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65 Identities of the Jew and the Hungarian András Gerő Our concepts often present themselves as ready interpretations. Their casual use saves us much effort by making something appear “self-evident” that would otherwise demand an explanation. The word “Jew” is used as a more or less selfevident category of identity, even though the content it conveys has been just as much transformed by secularization, modernization, assimilation, and acculturation as any other category of identity. Whatever meaning we ascribe to it, the word “Jew” denotes a minority throughout the diaspora, and as with every minority, what is decisive is the content of the category expressing the majority, and how that content changes. Majority and minority—under any interpretation— contextualize each other and take their meanings with reference to each other. The question of what is what, and how we define things, is a matter of decoding or, more precisely, the means of decoding. For this, of course, we also need the words and concepts by which we attempt to say anything at all. The means of decoding is history itself. History can be interpreted as the story of society, the course of politics , and as many other things such as awareness, identity, self-identity, and classifications of ourselves made or expressed by others. This is true for Jews, Hungarians , Communists, etc. Seemingly straightforward identities could be ambiguous, and sometimes mutually entangled, or even deliberately confused. Interpretation is more and more difficult, if for no other reason than we also have to interpret the interpreter . In the Europe before secularization and the modern idea of the nation—up to the nineteenth century in Hungary—a Jew was a person whose religion was Jewish . The Jewish religious enlightenment in German-speaking Europe reinterpreted much of religion and religious rules, and thus created major differences among believers of the same religion (there is a substantial amount of scholarship on this subject, see, e.g., Katz; Katzburg). Followers of the diverging movements may have criticized, indeed vilified, each other, but this did nothing to change the fact that Jewishness meant Judaism, even if there were wider and wider differences as to what was regarded as Judaism. Jews argued and wrangled with each other, but everyone else regarded them as Jews on the grounds of their religion. In consequence , prejudices against Jews was known as anti-Judaism, since it was expressed in the name of Christianity, against Jews as followers of Judaism. However, the in- 66 András Gerő ternal cracks caused the Judaism-based concept of Jewishness in Hungary to fall apart within a couple of decades. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , religious identity and self-identity had broken into three distinct groups: The neology, the orthodoxy, and the status quo ante movements (see McCagg; Veneti áner). Depending on the movement they adhered to, Jews went to different synagogues, dressed differently, and led different lives. As Judaism’s cracks deepened , Jews in Hungary became divided. Their uniform image in the eyes of nonJews could, of course, have remained intact, but other changes were taking their effect on the concept of the Jew. In the nineteenth century Jews in Hungary experienced the results of a combination of existing social prejudices, the tradition of anti-Judaism, and the beginnings of equal rights. They also experienced the Hungarian national uprising against Austrian rule, with the promise of equality, followed by riots involving anti-Judaist rhetoric and a tendency towards and early emergence of modern antiSemitism . And of course they experienced the—somewhat belated—acceptance to equal rank by the modern Hungarian national consciousness when an Act of Parliament was passed on the issue in 1849. Beset with pitfalls and setbacks as it was, the process nonetheless gained further reinforcement immediately after the Compromise with Austria in 1867, when equal rights and emancipation for Jews was enshrined in law (on the history of Jews in Hungary in the nineteenth-century and in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, see Bernstein; Bányai; Gerő; Gerő, Patterson, and Koncz; Miskolczy). The possibility and challenge of national identity became an increasingly broader reality under the liberal political disposition in the years that followed. The rising current of assimilation—a term that covers a highly complex set of phenomena—swelled to become the mainstream of Jewish affairs. Examining the appeal that assimilation held for Jews explains much in social terms of what was behind religious fragmentation. The power of neologism grew from national —and thus secular—identification. Jews, at least...

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