Is There a Resurgence of Hungarian Anti-Semitism?

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

With the rise of Victor Orban and his Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz), a nationalist party now dominates Hungarian politics.

In 1988 Orban helped found the party, initially as a youth-oriented liberal anti-Communist group. But under Orban’s guidance, it began to move to the right, especially since its landslide victory in the 2010 national election. In 2014, it took 44.87 per cent of the vote, winning 133 of 199 seats.

He now hopes to lead a “cultural counter-revolution” in Europe, in which liberal ideas like helping refugees are supplanted by identity-based notions of family, community and Christianity, with the European Union stripped of its powers to force asylum-seekers onto unwilling countries.

With political freedom has come a renewed sense of Hungarian nationhood, and Orban has tapped into this nationalistic mood. He even questions Hungary’s membership in the EU.

Hungarian Jews have reason to be alarmed by this, as there are unpleasant precedents to this type of rhetoric.

In the first few decades of the 20th century the Jews of Hungary numbered roughly five per cent of the population. Jews were disproportionately represented in the professions and in commerce, relative to their numbers.

But after the First World War, the country was ruled by an autocrat, Admiral Miklos Horthy, whose views towards Jews verged on anti-Semitism.

“I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theater, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad,” he remarked in a letter to one of his prime ministers.

In 1920 Horthy introduced the quota system at the universities, restricting Jewish presence to a maximum of six per cent of all students enrolled.

Numerous anti-Jewish laws were passed in the late 1930s, as the country moved closer to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Hungary would join the Axis powers in World War II.

Nonetheless, Hungary’s Jews did not become engulfed by the Holocaust until March 1944, when German tanks occupied the country, and the viciously pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party took power. Of the original 825,000 Jews in the country before the war, about 565,000 perished, most at the Auschwitz death camp.

During the Communist period, anti-Semitism was formally forbidden, though Zionism and mass immigration to Israel were not allowed and contacts between Hungarian Jewry and world Jewry were curtailed.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet control created a problem of loyalty for the Jews, whom the Soviet Union had saved from Hitler and his collaborators. The fact that a few of the Communist leaders were Jews fueled the hatred of anti-Semites.

Since the end of Communist rule in 1990, anti-Semitism has openly re-emerged.

One of the major representatives of current anti-Semitic ideology is the Movement for a Better Hungary, known as Jobbik, In the election of 2014, the party secured 20.22 per cent of the total vote, good for 23 seats, making them Hungary’s third largest party in parliament.

In November 2012, Marton Gyongyosi, one of the party’s leaders, posted a video speech on the Jobbik website in which he called for a list to be drawn up of all the Jews in government because he deemed them to pose “a national security risk to Hungary.”

Jewish organizations responded by describing it as a reintroduction of Nazism in Hungary.

In May 2013, Jobbik members protested against a World Jewish Congress meeting in Budapest, claiming the protest was against “a Jewish attempt to buy up Hungary.” Nine months later Tibor Agoston, the deputy chairman of Jobbik’s organization in Debrecen, Hungary’s second largest city, referred to the Holocaust as the “holoscam.”

A report produced in April by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies found that 53 per cent those aged between fifteen and thirty-four years old said they would vote for Jobbik, and only 17 per cent for the ruling Fidesz party.

Hungary’s Jews have reason to be frightened.