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Jews and Peasant in Interwar Hungary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
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.
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- Copyright © 1982 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc.
References
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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
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