What is it about?
Most of the free royal cities and all mining cities of Hungary banned Jewish in-settlement by 1840. However, in my research I focused my attention to the half century before the settlement permits for the indicated cities, since they saw several waves of Jewish immigration in Hungary. I found, it was the first important stage of mutual acculturation of the above-mentioned traditional urban societies and Jewish communities. It was a period of time that is essential for the understanding of urban settlement, the subsequent integration and the controversial processes of assimilation/dissimilation and intra-urban spatial segregation. The closing date of our research falls on the year of 1870 because my intent was to do an extensive survey of space and society structures relying on the data of the census taken in that year, on the basis of the analytic sources of the Geoinformatic Social History Database of Debrecen (GISHDD) containing today more than two billion data element.
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Why is it important?
The choice of residence, the conflicts and successes of settlement and cohabitation present a warning for further research and interpretation, namely, that it is not possible to consider either a homogeneous Jewish, or a homogeneous „cívis” society at a time of modernization and change. The Jewish settlers did not come to a finite, immobile, consolidated local society, therefore, alongside other methodological problems it might be worth redefining the concepts of assimilation-acculturation-integration that describe mostly unilateral processes of movement. The Jewish community itself was also divided according to community of origin and generational brackets, and differentiated even further in the course of modernization, while the society of the host city also experienced the hopes and tribulations of transformation, differentiating more and more according to wealth, social status, market success or failure. The host community was forced to lose its privileges, but retained its position of wealth and power, and was eager to utilize its new market opportunities.
Perspectives
From both points of view Jewish settlement seems to be a process of conforming based on mutual learning processes (acculturation), and a mutual quest based on cohabitation among other things, to reach partly known, but mostly unknown goals of industrialization. The mental image, strategies, aspirations for modernization and traditionalism/orthodoxy of either community did not mean that these groups were against progress or were antagonistic towards foreigners; instead, it meant that these communities were in search of a way to modernize without losing community traditions and interests, and retaining / improving their position, as well as a means to co-operate in the hope of success. It was the fears, customs and the ever more frequent cases of understanding or common activities of both communities that were the foundations of a successful urbanization of d that were the foundations of the successful urbanization of Debrecen at the turn of the century. (It is not a coincidence that László Gonda, the monographer of the Jewish community of Debrecen, called the next period, which was based on the trends before 1870, the „generation of emancipation”, and the period at the turn of the century and the beginning of the following century the „golden age of the synagogue”.) If it is possible to interpret the narrative, according to which the 19th century Debrecen can be considered as a kind of ideal for embourgeoisement in Hungary, in my opinion it can be considered an ideal only in a sense of embourgeoisement based on Judeo-Christian coexistence and co-operation. Even if this process was full of friction and disputes even at its tide within the cohabitant communities (orthodox versus neologism versus status quo, conservative versus liberal versus traditionalist).
Janos Mazsu
University of Debrecen
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This page is a summary of: Jewish Settlement in Prohibited Cities, East Central Europe, January 2015, Brill Deutschland GmbH,
DOI: 10.1163/18763308-04202010.
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