Les juifs dans la structure des classes en Hongrie
Authors: Karady Victor , Kemény Istvàn 
Published: October 2008

Jews in the class structure of Hungary. An essay on the historical roots of the anti-semitic crises of the twentieth century.

The first crisis of anti-Semitism in Hungary occured immediately after World War One. The present essay attemps to elucidate the conditions which made this crisis possible by means of an analysis of the massive social integration of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century and of the structural disequilibrium this produced in various areas of Hungarian society. A survey of the historical circumstances of the establishment of Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe brings out the singular nature of the Hungarian situation : from the time of the edict of toleration proclaimed by Joseph II in 1781, Hungary offered optimal conditions for neweomers which elicited a massive immigration. As a result, towards the end of the century there existed a historically unique combination of a large number of Jews raised «in the Oriental manner» and the possibility of their becoming integrated «in the Western manner».

The political policy of Magyarization and of integration pursued by the liberal and nationalist nobility led to such measures as the citizenship law of the Estates General of 1840, the Jaw of emancipation voted by the Revolutionary Assembly in 1849 (though its effects were only ephemeral, its was the first of its kind in Eastern or Central Europe), and the definitive law of emancipation which foliowed the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. This policy openend the way for the socio-cultural assimilation of the Jews. At the same time, the incapacity of this same nobility to enter into the bourgeois professions left the field free for the mobile elements among the immigrant Jews to take over control of the country's wholesale trade (especially in agricultural products) and to enter the intellectual occupations. After the compromise of 1867 there no longer existed any obstacles to the development of capitalism, and the Jewish bourgeoisie, endowed with remarkable business skills and in possession of liquid capital, steadily strengthened its position, playing the major role in the creation of the country's industrial, financial, and commercial infrastructure, while simultaneously remaining outside the governing classes.

Thus, towards the end of the century, a division of the work of social domination became established in which the descendants of the nobility, who were often impoverished, the gentry), took up new positions in the official administration while the bourgeoisie, the majority of whom were Jewish, took possession of the economic power. Like the dominant classes, the middle classes, -notably the intelligentsia- remained divided into Jewish and Christian fractions, each of which was marked, at first, by different social origins, by a different ethos, and by different collective ambitions and each of which occupied relatively separate positions within the intellectual and liberal professions.

At the beginning of the twentieth century one can observe, on the one hand, a fusion of the Jewish and Christian intelligentsia in the fields of intellectual production which were situated far from the center of socio-economic power and which included a large proportion of Jews, and, on the other hand, an increasing degree of competition between Jews and Christians in the other areas of middle class activity. This competition was exacerbated by World War One, which provo-ked a dramatic contraction of the markets of economic and symbolic production. This development, in turn, served as the pretext - helped along by the collapse of the liberal political regime - for an anti-Semitic activism in the middle classes which continued to increase until World War Two.