The new monograph by Tamás Turán is now published by De Gruyter Press, as the Volume 55 in the series Europäisch-jüdische Studien – Beiträge. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110741285 Further information is available at the publisher's website: HERE.

About this book: Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), one of the founders of modern Arabic and Islamic studies, was a Hungarian Jew and a Professor at the University of Budapest. A wunderkind who mastered Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic as a teenager, his works reached international acclaim long before he was appointed professor in his native country. From his initial vision of Jewish religious modernization via the science of religion, his academic interests gradually shifted to Arabic-Islamic themes. Yet his early Jewish program remained encoded in his new scholarly pursuits. Islamic studies was a refuge for him from his grievances with the Jewish establishment; from local academic and social irritations he found comfort in his international network of colleagues. This intellectual and academic transformation is explored in the book in three dimensions – scholarship on religion, in religion (Judaism and Islam), and as religion – utilizing his diaries, correspondences and his little-known early Hungarian works.

Margit Feischmidt, Ildikó Zakariás, András Morauszki, Csilla Zsigmond and their co-authors will attend the hybrid workshop of the Karl Polanyi Research Centre of Global Social Studies on 3 April. Facebook event.

The title and abstract of their presentation: Solidarity with displaced people from Ukraine in Hungary: attitudes and practices. Based on a population survey from the summer of 2022 the presentation draws an ambivalent picture of Hungarian civil society in the context of the war against Ukraine. First, it highlights the exceptional momentum and mobilizing power of civil solidarity both in terms of practical involvement and expressed attitudes. At the same time, the results also reveal the limits and vulnerabilities of civil solidarity: its exposure to populist political discourses, which cherish or condemn moral economies of assistance according to its vested interests, as well as its embeddedness in a neoliberal reliance on citizens’ individual resources (disposable time and material means), and salient inequalities in sharing the burdens of humanitarian support.

The new open access article in Slovak by Csilla Fedinec and István Csernicskó was published in Jazykovedný časopis and is available at HERE.

Abstract. Along with portraits of historical figures, images relating to the culture and history of a particular nation, the presence (or absence) of languages on banknotes is also an element of symbolic politics and part of the manifestation of the language policy of a particular state. In this paper, banknotes are seen as an element of the linguistic landscape, and the linguistic landscape - as a reflection of language policy, its peculiar public expression. This paper analyses the way in which the text displayed on multilingual banknotes constructs and reproduces linguistic hierarchies, reflecting the relative status of the languages within two multi-ethnic states: the Czechoslovak Republic and the Soviet Union. The study explores which languages were represented in the inscriptions of the various series of banknotes issued, based on the assumption that banknotes participate in the official language practices constituting the linguistic landscape and as such mediate language ideologies. The authors conclude that even multinational states that issue multilingual banknotes guarantee that the state language should be in a dominant position.

Through the research Helping Displaced People from Ukraine: Collective Forms and Social Contexts of solidarity (lead researcher: Margit Feischmidt) our institute has become a member of the international research network FORUM (Forced Migrants from Ukraine in Transnational Europe), founded by the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) and Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien (ZOiS). Prior to joining, an international workshop on the topic was co-organised by our Institute on 15 December 2022.

The new article by Zsombor Csata, Attila Papp Z. and their co-authors is now published online in Regional and Federal Studies, and is available at HERE.

Abstract. Can linguistic diversity in the media impede state language proficiency? In this paper, we test the extent to which the availability of minority languages in the media affects state language proficiency for ethnic minorities. We take advantage of an exogeneous development: The rapid expansion of Budapest-originating media outside Hungary in the mid-2000s transformed the media landscape in neighbouring states. Using an original survey data of ethnic Hungarians in minority regions in four Central-Eastern European states over two waves, we find (1) the availability of minority language media means minorities are consuming less media in the state language, which in turn induces low levels of state language proficiency – i.e. through an exogeneous exposure mechanism; and (2) minorities with weaker state language proficiency choose to consume minority language media – i.e. through an endogenous selection mechanism. The results suggest a strong relationship between the language of media consumption and linguistic proficiency.