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Tainted greatness: The case of voltaire's anti-semitism
The testimony of the correspondence
Christian churches both Catholic and Protestant experienced a renewal of their theology and a revival of their impact on society in the interwar period; and they could count on the continuous good will of the conservative Horthy regime. Convinced that the leading role of Jewish intellectuals in the 1918-1919 revolutionary upheaval resulted the near ruin of the traditional society and amidst the shock caused by the collapse of historical Hungary, some leading members of Protestant churches endorsed various forms of political anti-Semitism, including the acceptance of some type of curtailment of religious equality, which had once been acclaimed as a significant achievement of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism. While maintaining their sympathy for the Horthy regime till the very last, the leaders of the churches opposed the persecution and deportation of Hungarian Jews, which began escalating after March 1944. This paper will discuss some of the possible contexts of the Reformed Church's public statements concerning the Holocaust after 1945 and will focus mainly on the writings and sermons of the leading figure of the Reformed Church Bishop László Ravasz (1882-1975).
“An Era More than Bleak”
György Ligeti and Ferenc Farkas in the 1940s
political life was a conservative parliamentary system with authoritarian elements. At the beginning of Miklós Horthy's tenure as Regent (1920), and from 1938 onwards, governmental anti-Semitism resulted in discriminatory legislation. Following a belated and
A zsidóság Nagy Sándor idejében került a görög világ látóterébe, amely először a „barbár filozófia" képzetkörébe illesztette bele az újonnan felfedezett népet. A Ptolemaios-kori Egyiptomban a zsidóság és görögség egymás mellett élése még problémamentesnek nevezhető; a kor irodalmában néhány közhelyet leszámítva nem beszélhetünk antiszemitizmusról. A „görög antiszemita irodalom" kezdetei jórészt egyiptomi papi körökhöz köthetők; az innen kikerülő hellénizált szerzők műveiben egy ősi egyiptomi—zsidó vallási ellentétről szóló hagyomány motívumai jelennek meg. Apión kezében futnak végül össze a görög „barbár-diskurzus", az egyiptomi Antiexodusnarratíva és az aktuális zsidó—görög politikai feszültségek szálai.
“ magyarize” . The possibility of becoming Hungarian turned into a matter of urgency when political and populist anti-Semitism appeared in the 1880s. Anti-Semitism created a need for Jews to stress their admittance into Hungarian society and to emphasize their
«Зачем нужен этот человек в новом обществе?...» Судьба еврейской литературы в культуре советской эпохи
Судьба еврейской литературы в культуре советской эпохи
The word “Jew” is used as a more or less self-evident identity category, even though the content it conveys has been just as much transformed by secularisation, modernisation, assimilation and acculturation as any other identity category. In the world before secularisation and the modern idea of the nation - up to the nineteenth century in Hungary - a Jew was somebody whose religion was Jewish. The internal cracks caused the Judaism-based concept of Jewishness in Hungary to fall apart within a couple of decades. The fragmentation of Jewry was no less down to the challenge of national and secular identities, but these challenges only took effect because of the confirmations they promised in different situations. Departing from traditional Jewish ways was “rewarded” by social and intellectual success. Zionism - whose founder, Theodor Herzl, was brought up in the culture of Budapest and Vienna - conceived Jewish identity as a national identity and attempted to bring Jews, who were following divergent routes, together through self-identification with the nation. The Holocaust did not change the historical nature of the disintegrated Jewish identity. The anti-Semitic, disenfranchising Hungarian national consciousness said: it does not matter what you are - if I say you are a Jew, you are a Jew. Communism said: it doesn't matter what you are, if you are not a Communist, you cannot be anything else.
The contradictory process and the ambivalent result of Jewish assimilation in Hungary between 1867 and 1944 were shaped both by the Neolog-Orthodox duality and the fast acculturation of the Neolog Jewry. The image persistently attached to the Jew in Hungary, the basis of any sort of anti-Semitism, was the denominational bound Jewishness; the identity created and sustained mainly by the urban Neolog Jewish bourgeoisie was, however, definitely Magyar. When image and identity came to be confronted with each other, then political anti-Semitism could get a firm footing; this had happened from just around the late nineteenth and especially the beginning of the twentieth century. Still, there is more than simply a continuity between the form of anti-Semitism characterizing the age of Dualism and the one accompanying the interwar period, when it even became a state policy. The former was rooted in the mental construction of a cultural code, while the latter was most closely associated with the cognitive construction of political code. This also meant that while the former was exclusively carried by some social movements hostile to the issue of Jewish assimilation, the latter led to rigid state discrimination applied against all those the image of whom was identified with Jewishness.
Abstract
In the study I tried to reconstruct the history of the Jewish community of Tállya and their synagogue, for up to now neither the community, nor the art historically important Torah ark has received due attention. After the Holocaust very few survivors came back to Tállya – a settlement in Tokaj-Hegyalja, a region of north-eastern Hungary – and not a single member of the former Orthodox congregation lives there today. The community built their third place of worship in the mid-nineteenth century, pulled down in 1964. The reasons why I found it important to map the socio-cultural and religious environment in more detail are commemorative and research methodological. The Israelite community enjoyed autonomy in choosing their rabbi and arranging all other domestic matters, and consequently, their taste, religious orientation, acculturation influenced the shaping of their synagogue building, the style of its furnishing and ritual objects. For lack of congregational documents, many kinds of sources (e.g. newspaper articles, recollections, biographies of rabbis, municipal documents) had to be interpreted within the context offered by the historical elaborations of the age. It was indispensable to shed light on the system of relations between Hasidism of growing influence from the early nineteenth century and traditional Orthodoxy, particularly because the tendencies of secession also appeared in the Tállya community, and the iconography of the Torah ark of their synagogue is most closely related to the carved Torah arks of East European Hasidic communities (in Poland, Galicia, Moldavia, etc.). According to archival sources the community leaders of Tállya could assert their wish to have the woodcarver create symbolic motifs on the ark despite the rabbi’s disapproval. As the direct antecedent to the composition I identified the masonry Torah ark of Mád, but the inventive, singular style of the carvings bears no kinship with the mentioned prototypes or the altars in churches in the vicinity. At the end of the paper I sum up the events that led to the demolition of the synagogue and the perishing of its interior furniture, relying on documents in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and the Monument Documentation Centre.
The earliest Jewish literary works in Hungary were late-medieval religious writings in Hebrew, and literary contributions in the Hungarian language only began to appear toward the middle of the 19th century. The first generation of Hungarian-Jewish writers firmly believed in the viability of a dual Hungarian and Jewish identity and in the prospects of Jewish and Hungarian coexistence, and these two concerns have remained central to Hungarian-Jewish literature ever since. Jewish emancipation was warmly supported by the intellectual and political elite of Hungary, and Jewish Hungarians gained full civil rights in 1867. However, to their bitter disappointment, they were soon facing a rapidly rising tide of anti-Semitism that ultimately led to the Hungarian Holocaust, in which over half a million Jewish Hungarians perished. Some Hungarian-Jewish writers responded to the rising tide of anti-Semitism with a classical dual identity position that censured assimilation involving a denial of Jewish identity, others responded by attempting to deliberately shed their own Jewish identities through conversion to Christianity or by becoming Communists, a handful of others by opting for Zionism, and in one controversial instance, by advocating the adoption of an ethno-national minority identity. After the Holocaust, many among the remnant Jewish Hungarians believed that Communism would help resolve the core existential questions facing them, but the studious silence of the totalitarian regime about the Holocaust merely left these sores festering in an unresolved limbo for decades. Curiously, the regime eventually did permit the publication of Fateless by Kertész, undoubtedly because of its anti-Nazi message, and quite missing the irony that its resolute anti-totalitarianism applied equally to them. During the 75 years between Emancipation and Holocaust, the magnitude of Jewish contributions to Hungary's literature, journalism, scholarship, culture, science, industry, banking and commercial enterprise had been almost without precedent in the annals of diaspora Jewish communities, and post-Holocaust Jewish Hungarians continue to play a prominent role in the literary, cultural, political, and academic life of contemporary post-Communist Hungary. However, the core issues of dual identity and co-existence that were first broached with such optimism in the middle of the 19th century are still unresolved and are likely to engage the attention of new generations of Hungarian-Jewish writers into the foreseeable future.
