Principal investigator: Dr. Konrád, Miklós

Participants: Prepuk Anikó, Bányai Viktória, Schweitzer Gábor, Mislovics Erzsébet, Tamás Máté, Toronyi Zsuzsanna

Period: 2022-2026

Grant, funding agency: NKFIH K 143231 

 

The last decades saw the multiplication of scientific writings about the history of Hungarian Jews between 1790 and 1918. Yet the systematic examination of modern Jewish identity still remains to be done. This is all the more regrettable as this was precisely the period in the history of Hungarian Jewry when their identity and self-definition became a matter of question, and for many men and women, an acute problem.

Modern Jewish identity became problematic as a result of the enormous transformations occurring during this period in the lives of Hungarian Jews. From a pariah group socially and culturally cohesive, isolated from majority society, yet undisturbed in its identity, Jews became an emancipated, socially upwardly, yet also culturally heterogeneous, group, a one that largely lost its inner cohesion. In 1900, Hungary was the only European country whose indigenous Jewish population went from ultra-Orthodox masses rejecting all form of assimilation, to culturally and linguistically Magyarized Neolog middle-class Jews, who had moved away from traditional religiosity, and intellectuals more or less totally estranged from their religion and community.

Yet all these men and women had one thing in common: the challenges of modernization and the assimilationist expectations of Hungarian liberal nationalism forced all of them to redefine what it meant to be – or not to be – Jewish. The aim of our research is a systematic study of the identities and self-perceptions of Hungarians Jews living through the enormous transformations of this period. Our ambition is to bring this historical topic in the mainstream agenda of Hungarian history writing.