Jewish Budapest: The Past And The Present

Note that I planned, wrote, and recorded several Budapest tours on VoiceMap. The app uses your location to play audio automatically at the right time and place – you can put your phone away and roam the city with me, so to say. My tours: City Center, Jewish Quarter, Andrássy Avenue.

Budapest is the largest Ashkenazi city in continental Europe today with about 100,000 people; the Jewish contributions to Budapest, especially since the mid 19th century, have been extremely substantial. In large numbers, Jewish people first settled in Hungary in the 13th century when king Béla IV enlisted their financial support to help rebuild the country after the Mongol and Tatar invasion. The biggest medieval Jewish community was in Buda back then (Budapest was two separate cities: Buda and Pest).

As elsewhere in Europe, life for Jews alternated between periods of religious and commercial liberties and brutal persecutions. For example, Jews were briefly expelled from Hungary in 1348 because the local Christians accused them of spreading the plague. During Ottoman Turkey's occupation of central Hungary (1526-1686), Jews obtained more autonomy – they were permitted to ply their trade across the Ottoman Empire and practice their religion. Both Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities existed then in Budapest, each with its own synagogue located on the Jewish Street, today's Táncsics Mihály utca on the Castle Hill.

While the small Sephardic prayer room still exists, the much-bigger Ashkenazi temple across the street from it was destroyed in 1686 when the allied Christian forces defeated the Ottomans in a bloody siege. During the battle, soldiers looted the Jewish Quarter and killed most of its residents.

The Habsburg Period (1686-1918)

All of Hungary then became part of the Habsburg Monarchy, which also ruled much of Central Europe. Steeped in the culture of the Counter Reformation, most Habsburg emperors were zealous Catholics and notoriously anti-Semitic, such as Charles VI and his daughter Maria Theresa (1740-1780). This meant that Jewish people were prohibited from entering cities to avoid competition to the local merchants and that they had to pay a so-called tolerance tax to remain in Hungary.

Still, conditions in other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy were even worse. In fact, thousands of Jewish settlers came to Hungary from Austria and the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) in the 18th century, when the Habsburgs passed a marriage law that permitted only the first-born son in a Jewish family to get married. In Hungary, which was governed by its own laws, this wasn't the case and Jews were allowed to settle on the properties of the aristocracy and manage their estates.

One of the biggest Jewish communities emerged in Óbuda, today part of Budapest, on the dominions of the Zichy family. The more enlightened landlords, such as the Zichy and the Esterházy, actively welcomed Jewish settlers when they saw how much profit they generated. In return, they allowed them to build houses, schools, and synagogues. This was the beginning of the alliance between the Hungarian aristocracy and the Hungarian Jewish community that came to profoundly shape the country's future.

Many Polish Jews also migrated to eastern Hungary after the 1772 partition of Poland when Galicia – a region just northeast of Hungary – became part of the Habsburg territories. This area was the hotbed of the Hasidic Jewish movements and several well-known Hasidic dynasties, such as the Satmars, originated in eastern Hungary. Polish Jews, in general, were poorer, more religious, and less educated than those who immigrated from Austria, Moravia, and Bohemia, and they mocked the Polish Jews as "Ostjuden" (Eastern Jews).

By the mid-19th century, there was a sharp divide between progressive Jews, most of whom lived in Budapest and other big cities, and orthodox Jews, who were mainly in the countryside. The progressives in Hungary, also known as Neologs, believed in the evolution of Judaism and a non-literal interpretation of the Torah. They took steps to assimilate into the local society: spoke Hungarian rather than Yiddish or German; gave up religious clothing; adjusted the Jewish liturgy to resemble a Christian worship. They also fought alongside Hungarian soldiers in the 1848 War of Independence against the Habsburgs. In return, the Hungarian political establishment, mostly liberal-minded nobles, became strongly pro-Jewish.

Jewish people in Hungary gained full equality of rights in 1867, around the same time as in Western Europe and sooner than elsewhere in the region. This was notable, because Hungary had a far greater Jewish population than any place in the West. By the turn of the century, nearly a quarter of Budapest's residents were Jewish, more than 200,000 people, making it the second biggest Jewish city in Europe after Warsaw. Nearly a million Jews lived in Hungary as a whole.

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Hungary introduced mandatory civil marriages in 1895 in part so that Jewish people marrying Christians could avoid dealing with the not especially accommodating Catholic Church. In this respect, the Hungarian side of Austria-Hungary was more advanced than Austria, where political anti-Semitism under the Viennese mayor, Karl Lueger, was widespread by the turn of the century. (You can read more about this in my interview with Habsburg historian, Steven Beller.)

Orthodox Jews resented the assimilation efforts of the Neologs. They thought that these concessions were pointless and that they compromised their religious beliefs and their whole lifestyles. As a result, after the 1869 Hungarian Jewish Congress, the two factions officially split (there was a third, smaller group called "Status Quo Ante" that wanted to keep things as they had been). It is because of this schism that Budapest's old Jewish Quarter has three synagogues near one another – Dohány, Rumbach, and Kazinczy. One for each faction.

This period, between 1867 and World War I is considered by historians the golden era for Jews in Hungary, when a unique symbiosis formed between the liberal political elites (notably Ferenc Deák, Gyula Andrássy, and József Eötvös) and the Jewish community. Hungary didn't have much of a middle class and politicians relied in large part on Jews to transform this feudal country into a modern industrial and urbanized society; in exchange, they crushed all political anti-Semitism and ensured that Jews had the same civil rights as the Christians.

Since this liberal political establishment was also very nationalist and since most Jews truly felt accepted and at home in Hungary, their assimilation was extremely rapid. Jews didn't just speak and feel Hungarian, many of them even Hungarianized their last names which is why it is usually impossible to identify a Jewish person in Hungary based on his or her last name alone. This level of assimilation didn't happen anywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe.

Jewish people quickly adapted to the demands of a modern capitalist society because they were far better educated than the average person and usually spoke multiple languages (Christian peasants were illiterate and so were most members of the lower nobility until the first half of the 19th century). This meant that Jews became the backbone of Budapest’s middle-class – around 60 percent of merchants, doctors, and lawyers were Jewish in 1910. As were most industrialists, most notably Manfréd Weiss, Sándor Hatvany-Deutsch, and Leó Goldberger, who laid the foundations of modern capitalist corporate culture in Hungary, for example by offering social benefits.

Jews were punching above their weight also in arts and sciences. Ironically, many of them became famous only after they fled the increasingly anti-Semitic Hungary following the collapse of Austria-Hungary. These include John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Dennis Gabor, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Michael Polanyi, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy Nagy, Robert Capa, and Andre Kertész.

World War II and the Holocaust

There are several possible explanations for the drastic rise of anti-Semitism following WWI. Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory after the war in 1920, which meant that suddenly it became a predominantly ethnic Hungarian country – previously, only about half of the population was Hungarian, with meaningful Romanian, Slovakian, German, and Serbian minorities. The government no longer depended politically on Jews to tilt the ethnic scale toward a Hungarian majority.

Low and mid-level Hungarian civil servants, who were nearly all Christian and who now fell outside the borders of the mother country, flooded impoverished Budapest and blamed Jews for the lack of jobs, claiming that Jews held too many middle-class positions. The fact that much of the leadership of Hungary's short-lived Soviet-style republic in 1919 consisted of Jews added insult to injury (it didn't matter that plenty of well-off "capitalist Jews" were also persecuted by that regime). This resentment led to the Numerus Clausus Law of 1920, which capped the proportion of Jewish students in universities across Hungary at six percent.

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As in much of Europe, the Great Depression of the 1930s prompted a political shift to the right in Hungary. It is generally accepted by historians today that regent Miklós Horthy, Hungary's leader between WWI and WWII, was an incompetent and gullible politician but not a rabid anti-Semite. Like others, he was hoping that Hitler's support would help regain at least some of Hungary's lost territories, the loss of which was, and still is today, viewed as a national tragedy (also by Jewish Hungarians, of course).

Four anti-Semitic laws were introduced between 1938 and 1942, which ultimately deprived Jews of their property and most basic human rights. At the same time, despite constant pressure from Nazi Germany, Horthy refused to deport Hungarian Jews and Hungary was viewed as a relatively safe haven by Jewish refugees fleeing other countries in Europe. Events turned truly tragic after March 1944, when the German army occupied Hungary (Hungary was a German ally, but the Germans worried that it might switch sides as they were losing the war).

In less than two months, 437,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian countryside to the concentration camp in Auschwitz where most of them were killed. The deportations were willingly executed by the local Hungarian gendarmerie under the orders of the government, which was being pressured by the Nazi leadership in Germany.

In Budapest, Jewish people were initially quarantined in so-called starred houses. In October, Hitler orchestrated the removal of Horthy after Horthy's failed attempt to join the Allies and installed the local Nazi Party in power led by Ferenc Szálasi. Soon, in November of 1944, the Jewish residents of Budapest were herded into a makeshift ghetto inside the Jewish Quarter. The Nazis built a wall around the ghetto that ran along Dohány utca, Károly körút, Király utca, and Kertész utca. Crucially, the Soviet troops liberated this ghetto in January, 1945, before Budapest's Jewish community could be deported to Auschwitz which is why most Jewish people in Budapest escaped the deportations. Still, thousands died in the ghetto of hunger and epidemics. They are buried in the mass grave of the Dohány Synagogue complex, known as the Garden of Remembrance.

Those with connections sought refuge in "protected houses" inside the Újlipótváros neighborhood. Embassies of neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden placed dozens of buildings under their jurisdictions to keep the Nazis away. The heroic activism of the Swiss Vice-Consul Carl Lutz and the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved tens of thousands of lives. But the protected houses ultimately became more dangerous than the ghetto itself as members of Szálasi's Arrow Cross Party regularly raided these buildings and shot its residents. The shoes monument on the Danube's bank in Budapest commemorates these victims.

During World War II, Jewish men were prohibited from serving in the regular Hungarian army; instead, they were part of so-called labor service units (munkaszolgálat) that were responsible for digging trenches, building roads, and carrying equipment. The commanders of these units were often known anti-Semites who made a habit of torturing and killing people. Members of the labor service were malnourished and without proper clothing – they weren't entitled to a military uniform – and thousands of them died in service, especially those deployed on the Eastern Front. Brutal as it was, being in the labor service offered a protection from the deportations.

Estimates on the total number of Hungarian Jews killed in the Holocaust vary because of changes in Hungary’s borders before, during and after World War II, and because many survivors remained abroad. There were 825,000 Jews in so-called Greater Hungary at the time of the German occupation in March 1944 and the consensus is that more than 500,000 died in the Holocaust.

Post-WWII and the Communist Era (1947-1989)

After World War II and the Holocaust, approximately 150,000 Jewish people remained in Hungary. Most of them lived in Budapest because, as mentioned, the capital city largely escaped the deportations. Also, some survivors from the countryside preferred not to go back there because their houses had been looted by neighbors while they were away and there were even some Jewish pogroms in the late 1940s (the poignant movie, 1945, deals with the return of survivors).

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International Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided vital support – money, food, clothing, medicine – to help survivors get back on their feet. Understandably, many of them wanted to immigrate to Israel (aliyah) and there were various Zionist groups that facilitated and financed these trips. As a result, tens of thousands of Jewish people left the country immediately after the war and also after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, moving to Israel, the United States, and Western Europe.

But it is also the case that the majority of Jewish people still felt that they were at home in Hungary and didn't want to leave it. Hungary is an exception in this regard and the roots of this go back to the unusually high level of assimilation mentioned earlier. In Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, for example, the remaining Jewish communities emigrated as a whole after WWII.

The Communist regime was openly against religion. Their main target was the Catholic Church, which was the biggest, but they also reined in Jewish congregations. To make monitoring easier, in 1950 they forced the three opposing factions into a single organization and kept it under constant surveillance through secret agents. Also, they pressured the Jewish leadership to sell dozens of synagogues across the country that had lost their members and become abandoned as a result of the Holocaust. These buildings were then knocked down or unrecognizably transformed, often leaving no trace of their past.

A sweeping nationalization program in 1949 meant that small retail and wholesale businesses were confiscated by the state. Among these were tens of thousands of Jewish-owned stores whose owners often ended up as employees in their companies, now working for the state.

In 1950 and 1951, the Communists Party deemed thousands of families class enemies and evicted them from their Budapest homes. These people were sent to small eastern Hungarian villages where they lived in abject poverty, doing agricultural work. The evicted consisted mainly of former aristocrats, army officers, and well-off businesspeople. It is estimated that 15-20 percent of the families were Jewish. Bizarrely, some of them had just returned from the concentration camps a few years earlier. (The main motivation of the evictions was to provide upscale accommodation for members of the Communist Party.)

Despite the fact that many in the Communist elite and administration were Jewish, especially up to the late 1950s, the system was far from favorable to Jews as the examples above show. The main enemy of the Communist regime was the vaguely defined capitalist class – everyone from skilled artisans to shopkeepers, teachers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, and industrialists – into which most Jewish people belonged. But it is also true that the Hungarian Communist Party didn't encourage or incite anti-Semitism.

The Present Day

With an estimated population of 80,000 to 120,000, Budapest is still home to the largest Ashkenazi community in continental Europe. The vast majority of these people aren't religious, although the usually deserted Dohány Street Synagogue fills up during the High Holiday services. Orthodox Jews have almost totally disappeared from Hungary as a result of the Holocaust and the post-war emigration to Israel and the United States, both of which impacted them disproportionately. The handful who stayed here live near the central synagogue on Kazinczy Street. During Sukkot, one can still see their booths (sukkah) set up in the courtyard.

Few people know that Satmar and Pupa Jews, the two biggest Hasidic sects in the United States today, both originate from Hungary. In fact, the older members in New York's Williamsburg neighborhood still speak fluent Hungarian.

There are 16 functional synagogues in Budapest – 31 in greater Hungary – with a total congregation size of only a few thousand members. Most of them belong to the Neolog faction under the umbrella organization of Mazsihisz, followed by the increasingly active Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidics, and the Autonomous Orthodox Jewish Community. Oddly, the Chabad-Lubavitch group, with no historical ties to Hungary, has won the favors of the current government and receives outsize state support, taking over valuable real estate and synagogues.

A total of five elementary, middle and high schools provide Jewish education alongside the Hungarian curriculum in Budapest. The city is also home to Central Europe's only university of Jewish studies, but since the university has historically belonged to the Neologs, orthodox Jews attend yeshivas in Vienna or Jerusalem instead.

Several glatt kosher restaurants and convenience stores scatter across Budapest's Jewish Quarter; these places mainly cater to tourists since few Jewish locals keep kosher. Instead of traditional symbols of Judaism, Jewish life in Budapest today lives on in more subtle ways. For example, flódni, a rich layered cake traditionally made for the Jewish holiday of Purim, has spread into the Budapest mainstream thanks to young Jewish-Hungarian pastry makers. Also, some restaurants serve excellent kosher-style dishes.

As other inner city neighborhoods, Budapest's Jewish Quarter (inner part of District 7) also declined starting in the 1950s when people moved out and to the suburbs. It was in the early 2000s that the neglected streets and dilapidated buildings of the old Jewish Quarter gave rise to a revitalized Hungarian culture prompted by the appearance of ruin bars – quirky drinking joints inside the vast courtyards of vacant pre-war buildings.

The ruin bar pioneer, Szimpla Kert, is also here. Today, the Jewish Quarter is one of the most fashionable parts of Budapest, lined with designer stores, cafés, and restaurants. Jewish people live in all parts of the city currently, not just in the Jewish Quarter where most signs of Jewish life have disappeared. Still, the densely built streets and three gorgeous synagogues stand as a reminder of a rich cultural past. The view of Szimpla Kert abutting Budapest's one remaining Jewish ritual bath (mikveh) on Kazinczy Street aptly symbolizes the Jewish Quarter’s past and present.