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Jews and Peasant in Interwar Hungary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

William O. McCagg Jr.
William O. McCagg Jr.*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

Hungary was one of three Eastern European countries which, between the great wars, contained both large peasant and Jewish populations. The others were Poland and Rumania, and in both the record is clear enough: the peasants can be said to have disliked the Jews. In Hungary, however things were not so simple.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , spring 1987 , pp. 90 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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References

Notes

1. Standard accounts are Braham, Randolph L., The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (New York, 1981); Janos, Andrew, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton, 1982); and Gy. Ránki, ed., Magyarország Története Tíz Kötetben, vol. 8 (Budapest, 1976).Google Scholar

2. Details in Bernstein, Béla, ed., A negyvennyolcas magyar szabadságharc és a zsidók (Budapest, 1898; reissued 1939), ch. 2.Google Scholar

3. Mark the disappointment about this in Gyula Szekfűu's classic Három Nemzedék (Budapest, 1920), pt. 4; and Klaus Schickert's Nazi Die Judenfrage in Ungarn (Essen, 1937), pp. 125ff.Google Scholar

4. Király, Béla, “Peasant Movements in the 19th Century” in Held, Joseph, ed., The Modernization of Agriculture: Rural Transformation in Hungary, 1848-1975 (Boulder and New York, 1980), pp. 151ff.Google Scholar

5. Erdei, Ferenc, A magyar falu (Budapest, 1940), pp. 48ff.Google Scholar

6. Bibó, István, “A zsidókérdés Magyarországon,” in Harmadik út (London, 1960), p. 254.Google Scholar

7. Convenient figures in István Hoóz, Népesedés politika és népesség fejlődés Magyarországon a két világháboru között (Budapest, 1970), pp. 67–68.Google Scholar

8. Kerék, Mihály, A magyar fold (Budapest, 1941), pp. 112-13.Google Scholar

9. Weis, István, A mai magyar társadalom (Budapest, 1930), chs. 1, 2.Google Scholar

10. Effective summary in Gyula Borbandi, Der ungarische Populismus (Mainz, 1976), ch. 2.Google Scholar

11. Thesis of Held, Joseph, “The Interwar Years and Agrarian Change,” in Held, ed., Modernization of Agriculture, pp. 293ff.Google Scholar

12. Tendency of Marxists, for example, Ferenc Pölöskei and Kálmán Szakács, Földmunkas és szegényparaszt mozgalmak Magyarországon, 1848-1948, 2 vols. (Budapest, 1962)Google Scholar

13. Janos, , Politics of Backwardness, pp. 240ff.Google Scholar

14. Convenient statistics in Alajos Kovács, A zsidoság térfoglalása Magyarországon (Budapest, 1922); his A Csonkamagyarországi zsidóság a statisztika tükrében (Budapest, 1938); Ernő László, “Hungary's Jewry: A Demographic Overview, 1918-1945,” Hungarian Jewish Studies 2 (1969): 137-82; and Braham, The Holocaust in Hungary, p. 1143.Google Scholar

15. László, , “Hungary's Jewry,” pp. 168-70Google Scholar

16. Ibid., pp. 158-61Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 150.Google Scholar

18. Schickert, , Die Judenfrage, pp. 97ff; Kovács, A zsidoság térfoglalása, pp. 45ff.Google Scholar

19. Kovács, , Csonkamagyarországi zsidóság a statisztika tükrében, pp. 39–47.Google Scholar

20. McCagg, William O., Jewish Nobles and Genuises in Modern Hungary (Boulder and New York, 1972; reissue 1986), ch. 6; Ránki, Magyarország története, pp. 473ff.Google Scholar

21. Sozan, Michael, “The Jews of Aba,” East European Quarterly 20 (1986): 195, n. 9.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., pp. 179-80Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 181.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., p. 184.Google Scholar

25. My Jewish Nobles and Geniuses provides background for the following. For the situation in Poland, see most recently Josef Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Amsterdam, 1983), pts. 1 and 2; for Rumania, C. Iancu, Histoire des juifs en Rumanie (Aix, 1978).Google Scholar

26. Gyula Illyés, People of the Puszta (Budapest, 1937), p. 7.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., chs. 8, 9.Google Scholar

28. Literature is cited by Peter Nagy in “The Ideas of the Hungarian Radical Right,” East European Quarterly 20 (1986): 215-25; George Barany, “Hungary: From Aristocratic to Proletarian Nationalism,” in Peter Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1969), pp. 294ff; and Borbandi, Ungarischer Populismus, pp. 91ff.Google Scholar

29. Király, Béla, “Peasant Movements in the Twentieth Century,” Mondernization of Agriculture, pp. 319ff.Google Scholar

30. There is a clear account in Borbandi, Ungarischer Populismus; see also the useful belittlement of village-exploring “sociography” in Michael Sozan, The History of Hungarian Ethnography (Washington, 1977), pp. 245ff.Google Scholar

31. Cf. Révai's, József 1937 essay, “Marxismus és népiesség,” in his Marxismus, népiesség, magyarság (Budapest, 1949).Google Scholar

32. Juhász, Gyula, “Hungarian Intellectual Life and the ‘Jewish Problem’ During World War II,” in Braham, Randolph L., ed., The Holocaust in Hungary Forty Years Later (New York, 1985), esp. pp. 65ff.Google Scholar

33. A Marxist account is provided by Kálmán Szakács, Kaszáskeresztesek (Budapest, 1963). Sectarianism is emphasized in Kovács, Imre, A néma forradalom (Budapest, 1937), pp. 246ff. See also Király, “Peasant Movements in the Twentieth Century,” p. 342; and István Deák, “Hungarian Fascism,” in Hans Rogger and Eugene Weber, eds., The European Right (Berkeley, 1965), pp. 383ff.Google Scholar

34. Bibó, “Zsidókérdés Magyarországon,” pt. 2, esp. pp. 275ff.Google Scholar

35. A comparative view is given in Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two Wars (Bloomington, 1983), ch. 2.Google Scholar

36. In general, see Bitton, Livia, “Jewish Nationalism in Hungary,” unpublished , New York University, 1968.Google Scholar

37. Farkas, Dezső, A magyarországi szociáldemokrata Párt és az agrárkérdés (Budapest, 1974).Google Scholar

38. Nagy, Zsuzsa L., “A liberális ellenzék pártjai és szervezetei, 1919-1944,” in Történelmi Szemle (1976), pp. 335ff.Google Scholar