Retrospectives from the eve of destruction: historical memory and images of the past in the Hungarian Jewish press, 1938-1944

In late 1937-early 1938 the Jews of Hungary celebrated the 70th anniversary of their emancipation. Several months later, the first in a series of anti-Jewish laws was enacted, thus marking the end of Jewish legal equality in the country. Examines how Jewish spokesmen in the period of 1938-early 1944, at the threshold of the Nazi Holocaust, evoked the Jewish and Hungarian past as a means of dealing with the crisis. Traces four types of historical narratives which emerged within Hungarian Jewish public discourse. The Liberal-Neolog narrative was built on Hungarian patriotism, a belief in progress and reason, and a depiction of the protected civic status of Jews as anchored in Hungarian national heritage. The Orthodox blamed the Neologs and the liberal model of assimilation supported by them, and called for a religious revival and a pact with the Hungarian state, similar to that of the Middle Ages. The Zionist narrative explained the crisis as a result of the faults and failures of the Jews themselves, especially due to assimilation. The Critical-Liberal narrative took a halfway attitude: this camp did not reject assimilation, but deplored "hyper-assimilation" and, like the Zionists, saw the crisis of Hungarian Jewry as part of the overall calamity befalling the Jews of Central Europe.