Jewish People in Hungary

Analysis of the legislation against the Jewish population should look separately at those parts written before and then after the German occupation. ^[1] We have no intention of underestimating the responsibility of the Hungarian political leadership and bureaucratic and law enforcement systems after the German occupation. Although the difference between National Socialist anti-Semitism and the economic anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century Hungarian nobility has been highlighted by several researchers, the victory of German anti-Semitism wouldn’t have been possible without the existence of this history of anti-Semitism in Hungary. It is worth going back to the years between 1868 and 1914, even the respected researcher Randolph Braham described this as the ’golden age of Hungarian Jewry’.

After the Compromise [providing equal standing for Hungary in the Empire subsequently known as Austria Hungary] in 1867, one of the first reforms of Jószef Eötvös, Hungarian minister for Religion and Education, was that giving religious and political equality to the Hungarian Jews. A law, XVII Relating to the Political and Civil Rights of the Israelites, extended rights previously applicable only to Christians, to all those practising the Israelite religion. And, after centuries of being deprived of the right to practise their religion, in 1895 Hungarian Jewry became an accepted and official religion through a law [1895/XLVII ] passed by Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle’s government. This legislation had a significant impact, on the one hand doors opened for Hungarian Jewry to areas of economic and political life which had been closed to them for the previous 600 years. With the right to own land many of them were able to get on the first rung of the social ladder and move swiftly up. By the turn of the century a very visible new social class had come into existence. With this fresh energy of freedom, enthusiastically assimilating Jewish families were knocking on the door of the old Hungarian nobility, the speed of this growth and their presence could not be ignored. This phenomenon aroused significant fears among the members of the nobility that their economic and social role was being challenged. This fear was intensified by the growth of Jewish immigration which started after the institution of the above mentioned laws. In the last years of the nineteenth century hundreds of Jewish families arrived mainly from the north of Austria and a minority from outside the Empire. They were very different from the Hungarian population in their language, appearance and customs and coming mainly from the poorest strata of society, arriving in Hungary working as pedlars. These differences, and their growing numbers, frightened the Hungarian population. By the end of the nineteenth century the population of Hungarian Jewry had tripled. All of this came to a head during the First World War when the Jewish population of the Russian Empire, escaping the Russian army, appeared in the cities of Europe. Thousands of people, mainly speaking only Yiddish and not understanding Hungarian and very different in their habits and appearance from the Hungarian population, lived for months on the streets of the capital deeply unsettling its people. ^[2] And, on top of all of this, after the war was lost and the Hungarian Communist party took power for its short-lived, bloody dictatorship, 90% of its ministers were Jewish. This phenomenon originated in the 600 years of isolation - specifically from the right to own land and to take part in political and social life - which meant that the number of Jews among radical intellectuals in the early twentieth century was higher than in any other segment of society. Hungary is not unique in this. Neither the Israelite religion nor Jewish ethnicity was a part of the identity of the Béla Kun government, who saw themselves not as Jews but as internationalists and communists. Although the majority of Hungarian nobility distanced themselves from the ’white terror’ reprisals following the communist dictatorship, the economic and social anti-Semitism inherited from the nineteenth century found an outlet, among other places in universities across Hungary, in serious physical violence against Jewish students by young Christians. It was in this atmosphere, in September 1920, that Pál Teleki’s government presented to Parliament a draft of the so-called Numerus Clausus, a law which limited to 6% the places for Jews in universities. It was the first anti-Jewish law in Europe after the war. ^[3] Hungarian Jewry had been excluded from so many areas of Hungarian social and political life for centuries that the higher levels of society had traditionally only been available to them, through education, this law restricted them in an area as yet untouched. The oft-cited words of Miklós Horthy that he wrote to Pál Teleki in October 1940, ’my dear Bóli, ^[4] you know that I have been an anti-Semite my whole life’ ^[5] must be understood in this context, from the perspective of a member of the nineteenth- century, Hungarian, Christian landed gentry. ^[6] As we say above a social class, the anti-Semitism of which was so ingrained, has never been equal to the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany aiming the complete destruction of the Jewish minority, but without the existence of the former, the latter could not have been given such a place in Hungary at that critical historic moment in 1944. ^[7]

In the series of laws of the anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary between 1920 and 1944, three periods can be distinguished. First, the post-war years between 1918-20, detailed above; the second wave of anti-Jewish laws can be identified in that period when the German National Socialist party came to power in Berlin and the Reich launched an aggressive policy of expansion due to the division and occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss [the German occupation of Austria when Germany actually became the western neighbour of Hungary]. The third began with the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.^[8]

By the end of 1938 the Third Reich had become a neighbour of Hungary on its north and north-west borders. There were no German requests to the Hungarian government to launch anti-Jewish legislation and it’s almost certain that there wouldn’t have been reprisals had Hungary failed to introduce such laws, however it’s beyond question that the ’gravitational pull’ [paraphrasing Lászlo Bárdossy in describing both the proximity, size and aggression of the German Empire, during his trial in 1946] had its effects on Hungarian legislation. ^[9]

Almost immediately after the Anschluss, on the 29th May 1938, the law [1938/XV] was enacted Ensuring the Effective Balance of Hungarian Economic and Social Life, commonly known as the first Jewish law in Hungary. 

On May 5th 1939 the second anti-Jewish law was announced which widened the application of the 6% limit for Jewish people in universities to the official bodies of the professions [spanning the arts, academia, medicine and industry]. 

On the 8th August 1941 the decree 1894/XXXI which related to the rights of marriage was completed, with modifications relating to purity of race. The decree 1941/XV, commonly known as the third Jewish law, forbade marriage between Jews and Christians.

Immediately after the German occupation of Hungary the Sztójay government inacted almost 100 articles against the Jewish inhabitants of the country. Those with Jewish origin were obliged to give up their memberships - and employment - in the chambers and fields of law, arts and cinematic arts, submit their vehicles, bicycles, and radios, were forbidden to be employed in Christian households. From April 1944 a yellow star of David was obligatory worn on their outer clothing, and at the end of the same month their properties were confiscated and frozen, and ghettos were established all around the country. [10]