Overview

Throughout the nineteenth century, Hungary's government steadily dismantled obstacles that kept its rapidly expanding Jewish communities from enjoying the full benefits of citizenship. The state's concerted efforts to ""Magyarize"" Jews promoted Hungarian language, culture, and sensibilities, but did not officially require Jews to abandon their faith. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews converted to Christianity during this era, with conversion rates continuing to rise even as Judaism gained full legal equality. Jewishness and Beyond addresses the apparent contradiction between these two trends. Despite the egalitarian promises and laws of Hungary's liberal nationalist government, the administration and traditional elites as a whole maintained a persistent bias against Jews that spurred particularly high conversion rates among the community's upper echelons. While Christians never forgot converted Jews' origins and increasingly thought of them in racialized terms, they also valued and generally rewarded conversion and the symbolic gesture of baptism. Conversion was an uneven and ever-shifting process in which gender and occupation played key roles, and where the actual percentage of converts within the total Hungarian Jewish population contrasted sharply with both Christian and Jewish perceptions of its frequency and spread. Jewishness and Beyond, which can be read as an introduction to the identity dilemmas of Hungarian Jews in the age of emancipation, reveals the motivations and strategies behind the conversions of Hungarian Jews, the complex reactions within and outside of their communities, and converts' own grappling with conversion's expected and unforeseen outcomes.

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""Miklós Konrád's study of conversion in Hungary is a major contribution to the social history of Central European Jewry in the modern period. The author's treatment of a potentially explosive subject is calm and nuanced. It is noteworthy for its comparative perspective and for its rich and often wide-ranging evidentiary base.""—Todd M. Edelman, author of Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews ""Confronted by a glass ceiling thwarting their integration into Hungarian society at the turn of the twentieth century, members of the economic and cultural Jewish elite were faced with a stark dilemma, leave their community through conversion, or remain steadfast to it at the expense of their advancement. Konrád's comprehensive analysis sensitively examines the decisions of a significant number to exit, at the same time shedding light on those who chose loyalty. A very important contribution to the history of Jews in Hungary.""—Michael K. Silber, editor of Jews in the Hungarian Economy, 1760-1945

"""Miklós Konrád's study of conversion in Hungary is a major contribution to the social history of Central European Jewry in the modern period. The author's treatment of a potentially explosive subject is calm and nuanced. It is noteworthy for its comparative perspective and for its rich and often wide-ranging evidentiary base.""—Todd M. Edelman, author of Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews ""Confronted by a glass ceiling thwarting their integration into Hungarian society at the turn of the twentieth century, members of the economic and cultural Jewish elite were faced with a stark dilemma, leave their community through conversion, or remain steadfast to it at the expense of their advancement. Konrád's comprehensive analysis sensitively examines the decisions of a significant number to exit, at the same time shedding light on those who chose loyalty. A very important contribution to the history of Jews in Hungary.""—Michael K. Silber, editor of Jews in the Hungarian Economy, 1760-1945"

Author Information

Miklós Konrád is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History at the Research Centre for the Humanities and at the Ignác Goldziher Jewish Historical and Cultural Research Institute in Budapest, Hungary.

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