Suicides of the Polish and Hungarian Types: Jewish Self-Destruction and Social Cohesion in Interwar Warsaw and Budapest

Europe suffered from an increase in the number of people seeking to take their own lives during the period between the wars. The chaos and horror of the First World War, the crushing economic hardships that plagued much of the continent throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and new social mores in the liberal atmosphere of the post-war years led to disillusionment, dislocation, and extreme despair. The fact that more people were living longer to crowd into the same urban areas only served to create more malaise and anomie in general. Poisons and firearms were more readily accessible than ever before, and the ubiquity of multi-storey dwellings in larger cities meant that jumping was now also an option for those considering suicide.

Jews, especially the more traditional communities of eastern Europe, saw themselves as resistant to self-destruction. There was a common belief that centuries of religiously sanctioned persecution meant that there was a duty to live.¹ As well, some speculate that the threat of real physical violence that Jews faced did not afford them the emotional luxury of focusing on the more abstract threats that most often lead to suicidal ideation: if a person has literally run for their life, professional or personal failure might be a more manageable hurdle.²

Yet rates of Jewish suicide in Europe began to rise along with the rates of non-Jewish suicide—though later and slightly more slowly—first in the west and centre and spreading to the rest of the continent over the course of the nineteenth century as industrialization increased and the population grew dramatically. The First World War unleashed new realities and challenges that proved too much for many to handle, especially Jews in economically destitute countries who were subjected to antisemitic financial policies. Nevertheless, Jews in Europe, and those in eastern Europe in particular, never seemed to commit suicide in greater proportion than non-Jews, whether measured in cultural, religious, or ethnic terms.

The suicide patterns of Polish and Hungarian Jews reflected developments within their respective wider societies.³ Using press reports, statistics, and individual accounts, this chapter investigates the responses to and contemporary understanding of increases in suicidal behaviour and of suicide itself among Jews in the Hungarian and Polish capitals between the wars. Hungary, and Budapest in particular, had been plagued by suicide to such a degree that the international hit song 'Gloomy Sunday', first recorded in Hungarian in 1935 and in English the following year (Billie Holiday recorded a legendary version in 1941), was internationally known as the 'Hungarian Suicide Song', lending weight to the idea that the country was more prone to self-destruction.⁴ Yet Polish Jews, and seemingly the rest of the Jewish world, were focused on the perception of an epidemic of suicides in Poland and especially Warsaw.

Once national borders had been more or less settled after the end of the First World War, it was never easier to speak of one Hungarian Jewish community and never more difficult to speak of one Polish one. Yet both these populations experienced increases in suicide that were dramatic and previously unseen. The Hungarian Jewish population—and Hungarians in general—experienced a rise in suicide that paralleled the rest of the Habsburg empire and most of the other industrializing powers of western Europe since the early to mid-nineteenth century. In the Polish lands, conversely, rates of suicide remained low even during the revolution of 1905, only starting to rise after the economic collapses of the early 1920s.

In Warsaw, where the champions of orthodox interpretations of Judaism hoped to make inroads, the rash of suicides in the early twentieth century caused serious panic. Beginning in the early 1920s Warsaw Jews worried about the continuity of the Jewish people. They feared that the freedoms and lack of social norms in the modern world made the population, especially the young, rudderless. New gender norms meant, in the opinion of community leaders, that young women were falling victim to all manner of new temptations. The suicides were an...