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

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel presents and analyzes the various responses that Hungarian Jewish spokespeople – community leaders, private people, and business elites – formulated in response to the First World War, and in particular to its violent and tempestuous aftermath, which in Hungary was characterized by social unrest, revolution, and terror. The many stories that emerge from inside the “Jewish experience” of war and violence are framed within the longer process of the waning of emancipation in Hungary, the Jewish tradition of responses to catastrophe and rupture, and the reformulations of Jewish belonging that resulted from these events. Especially but not limited to Hungary, interpretations of anti-Jewish violence were often aimed at upholding a sense of belonging in the face of increasing social exclusion and real, physical danger. It is this notion that will be explored in more depth in this panel.

The papers in this panel each present a response to the question of how Hungarian Jews narrated their experiences of war and violence in its immediate aftermath, concentrating not on the violence itself but on interpretations that emerged from a desire by many of those affected to maintain a continuous, albeit troubled, co-existence with their increasingly Christian surroundings. In highlighting the many and often conflicting layers of these narratives of violence, the contributions highlight previously neglected viewpoints of Jewish actors during these short transitional years between complete destruction and relative piece. These include, among others, the Western parties of the America Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, sent to Hungary for relief and reconstruction, the Orthodox Jews in the provinces, and the Jewish business elites in Transylvania. Together, these papers aim to present the complexities and depth of Hungarian Jewish responses to national belonging in the face of enforced dissimilation and social exclusion.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in Europe, Asia, Israel, and Other Communities

Chair

• Rebekah Klein-Pejsova, Purdue University

Individual Presentations

• “The most tragic of all the European Jewries”: The JDC and Hungary’s White Terror, 1919–1922 - Emily R Gioielli, Central European University, Department of History

• “We are looking with confidence into the unknown future”: Orthodox Jews and the Border Provinces in Postwar Hungary - Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, Center for Jewish History

• Losing Ground? Hungarian Jewish Business Elites Facing the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - Mate Rigo, Cornell University