Transleithanian Paradise

Howard N. Lupovitch

Description

Transleithanian Paradise: A History of the Budapest Jewish Community, 1738–1938 traces the rise of Budapest Jewry from a marginal Ashkenazic community at the beginning of the eighteenth century into one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the world by the beginning of the twentieth century. This was symptomatic of the rise of the city of Budapest from three towns on the margins of Europe into a major European metropolis.

Focusing on a broad array of Jewish communal institutions, including synagogues, schools, charitable institutions, women’s associations, and the Jewish hospital, this book explores the mixed impact of urban life on Jewish identity and community. On the one hand, the anonymity of living in a big city facilitated disaffection and drift from the Jewish community. On the other hand, the concentration of several hundred thousand Jews in a compact urban space created a constituency that supported and invigorated a diverse range of Jewish communal organizations and activities.

Transleithanian Paradise contrasts how this mixed impact played out in two very different Jewish neighborhoods. Terézváros was an older neighborhood that housed most of the lower income, more traditional, immigrant Jews. Lipótváros, by contrast, was a newer neighborhood where upwardly mobile and more acculturated Jews lived. By tracing the development of these two very distinct communities, this book shows how Budapest became one of the most diverse and lively Jewish cities in the world.

List of Tables

Preface

Part I. Beginnings, 1738–1838

1. Introduction: Budapest as a Laboratory of Urban Jewish Identity

2. The Óbuda Kehilla and the Magnate-Jewish Symbiosis

3. Terézváros and the Pest Jewish Community

Part II. Coming of Age, 1838–1873

4. Washing Away the Ancien Régime : The Great Flood and the Rebranding of Budapest, 1838–1873

5. A Model Neolog Community: From Nordau’s Pest to Herzl’s Budapest

6. The Pest Jewish Women’s Association: A Cautious Path to the Mainstream

7. The Other Side of Budapest Jewry: Orthodox and Lower-Income Jews

Part III. After Trianon

8. Paradise Waning: War, Revolution, and the New Budapest, 1914–1938

9. 1938 and Beyond

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• Hungría
• Obuda
• Austria
• Dohány Street Synagogue
• Magyarization
• History of the Jews in Hungary
• Jewish identity
• Neolog Judaism
• Jewish emancipation
• Ashkenazi Jews
• Judaism
• Hungary
• History of Europe
• Austria-Hungary
• Ashkenazi
• History
• Budapest
• Hongrie
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612497815
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

T RANSLEITHANIAN P ARADISE
Central European Studies
Charles W. Ingrao, founding editor
Paul Hanebrink, editor
Maureen Healy, editor
Howard Louthan, editor
Dominique Reill, editor
Daniel L. Unowsky, editor
Nancy M. Wingfield, editor
The demise of the Communist Bloc a quarter century ago exposed the need for greater understanding of the broad stretch of Europe that lies between Germany and Russia. For four decades the Purdue University Press series in Central European Studies has enriched our knowledge of the region by producing scholarly monographs, advanced surveys, and select collections of the highest quality. Since its founding, the series has been the only English-language series devoted primarily to the lands and peoples of the Habsburg Empire, its successor states, and those areas lying along its immediate periphery. Among its broad range of international scholars are several authors whose engagement in public policy reflects the pressing challenges that confront the successor states. Indeed, salient issues such as democratization, censorship, competing national narratives, and the aspirations and treatment of national minorities bear evidence to the continuity between the region s past and present.
Other titles in this series
Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792-1848
Scott Berg
Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II
Pawe Markiewicz
Balkan Legacies: The Long Shadow of Conflict and Ideological Experiment in Southeastern Europe
Bal zs Apor and John Paul Newman (Eds.)
On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire
Annemarie Steidl
Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria
Scott O. Moore
T RANSLEITHANIAN P ARADISE
A History of the Budapest Jewish Community, 1738-1938
Howard N. Lupovitch
Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2023 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.
978-1-61249-780-8 (paperback)
978-1-61249-779-2 (hardback)
978-1-61249-781-5 (epub)
978-1-61249-782-2 (epdf)
Cover photo: istock.com/florin1961
For my parents, Aaron and Rochelle Lupovitch
Contents
List of Tables
Preface
PART I. BEGINNINGS , 1738-1838
1. Introduction: Budapest as a Laboratory of Urban Jewish Identity
2. The buda Kehilla and the Magnate-Jewish Symbiosis
3. Ter zv ros and the Pest Jewish Community
PART II. COMING OF AGE , 1838-1873
4. Washing Away the Ancien R gime: The Great Flood and the Rebranding of Budapest, 1838-1873
5. A Model Neolog Community: From Nordau s Pest to Herzl s Budapest
6. The Pest Jewish Women s Association: A Cautious Path to the Mainstream
7. The Other Side of Budapest Jewry: Orthodox and Lower-Income Jews
PART III. AFTER TRIANON
8. Paradise Waning: War, Revolution, and the New Budapest, 1914-1938
9. 1938 and Beyond
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
List of Tables
1 Population Growth, 1800-1890, by Percentage
2 Jews in Pest by District
3 Ter zv ros by Denomination
4 Curriculum of the Pest School, 1828
5 Employees of the Pest School, 1814-1834
6 The Three Towns on the Eve of the rv z
7 Percentage of Homes Damaged or Destroyed by the Flood, 1838
8 Number of Houses in Pest before and after the Flood, 1838
9 Housing Damage in Pest Caused by the Flood
10 Total Property Damage Caused by the Flood in Pest
11 Monetary Donations to Flood Victims from Pest Jewish Notables, March 1838
12 Monetary Donations to Flood Victims from Pest Jewish Notables, Summer 1838
13 Population Net Change in the Three Towns, 1837-1840
14 Increase in the Number of Households in Pest, 1838-1849
15 Population of Buda, buda, and Pest, 1836-1870
16 Population of Buda and Pest, 1851
17 Pest Jews by Occupation, 1848
18 Jewish Artisans in Pest, 1848
19 Jewish Occupations in Pest, 1869
20 Council Election of 1846
21 The Pest Jewish Hospital, 1849-1851
22 Enrollment in the Pest Jewish Schools, 1856
23 Pesti Izraelita N egylet Financial Portfolio, 1869
24 Sectional Leadership, 1875
25 Student/Scholar (Lamdanim) Stipends, 1875-1876
26 Balance Sheet, May 1875
27 Jewish Population of Budapest, 1910-1935
28 Jewish Subscribers to Hungarian War Fund, November 1914
Preface
THIS BOOK, A HISTORY OF THE BUDAPEST JEWISH COMMUNITY FROM 1738 through 1938, grew out of two seemingly unrelated encounters. The first took place when I visited Budapest for the first time. Walking the streets of the Jewish part of the city, I was surprised to learn that Theodore Herzl, the quintessential assimilated Hungarian Jew, grew up right next door to the Doh ny Street Synagogue, the hallmark of Jewish communal life, but rarely attended; and that the Doh ny Street, Rombach Street, and Orthodox Kazinczy Street Synagogues, the Jewish Triangle formed by the main synagogues of three different religious denominations, were located just a few blocks from one another. In both cases, I was struck by the close proximity of such different Jewish outlooks and that, despite the thematic distance that separated Herzl from the Doh ny Street Synagogue and the two synagogues from each other, they were all located within a single square mile.
The second encounter took place when I was teaching an undergraduate seminar called Jews and the City. Each week, the students and I situated Budapest Jewry and other leading European Jewish communities in a comparative framework that distinguished these cities geographically between Eastern, Central, and Western Europe; and culturally between more traditional communities such as Warsaw and Vilnius and more assimilated communities such as Vienna and Budapest. At one point, a student who hailed from Istanbul noted a European paradigm common to all of these Jewish communities in major cities across Europe from London to Lvov and from Vilnius to Vienna. Drawing on an extra-European perspective of geography and history, the student argued that the similarities between urban European Jewish communities far overshadowed the geographical and cultural differences between them; all, he concluded, evinced a common set of European urban Jewish characteristics.
My student s extra-European perspective and the compact diversity of Budapest s Jewish neighborhood have remained with me through years of research and writing, and, in tandem, were a helpful guide in formulating and pursuing what became one of the central themes of this book: the concentration of a large, diverse population of Jews in a compact urban space is something that Budapest Jewry shared in common with large Jewish communities in other large European cities. Like other Jewish communities in larger urban centers, the rise of Budapest Jewry was inseparable from the rise of the city that housed it. The rapid growth of Jewish communities in Budapest and other urban centers during the nineteenth century was a symptom of these cities redefining the urban space-political, economic, cultural space-available to groups like Jews who hitherto had been largely excluded and, at most, only selectively included. Key aspects of the rise of Budapest Jewry during the long nineteenth century were no less important in the rise of other large Jewish communities. Examples abound, beginning with the sheer size and rapid growth of Budapest Jewry. In 1800, a Jewish community of 5,000 or 10,000 was considered large; a century later, Budapest Jewry, which had exceeded 200,000, was one of a dozen European Jewish communities approaching or in excess of 100,000. No less important a similarity was the dispersal of this large Jewish population all over the city with the largest concentrations in an older, original Jewish neighborhood inhabited by less acculturated, less affluent, more recent Jewish arrivals; and a newer Jewish neighborhood for upwardly mobile, acculturated Jews, native-born Jews-Ter zv ros and Lip tv ros in Budapest, Leopoldstadt and Alsergund in Vienna, Marais and Montmartre in Paris, and in the United States, the Lower East Side and Washington Heights in New York City.
The other theme of the book is the distinctly Hungarian aspects of Budapest and its Jewish community. The rise of Budapest and Budapest Jewry was shaped by the rhythms of its distinctly Hungarian and East Central European context. The most striking example, and another central theme of this book, is the particular juxtaposition of the old and the new, of change and continuity. Budapest Jewry was regarded as one of the most highly acculturated Jewish communities in the world, while housing a large and diverse array of Jewish communal organizations that included dozens of synagogues, schools, a world-class rabbinical seminary, newspapers, voluntary organizations, kosher butchers. Other communities had one or the other-for example, the Jewish community of Vienna was highly assimilated with a smaller traditional enclave; the Jews of Warsaw had a vibrant traditional Jewish life with a minority of acculturated Jews. Budapest had both.
The juxtaposition of the old and the new as constituent elements of Budapest Jewry is a central focus of this book. To this end, the book focuses on the two centuries from 1738 through 1938, using 1838 as a fault line between these two periods in the rise of Budapest Jewry.
More specifically, following the introductory chapter that contrasts the modern and the premodern city, chapters 2 - 4 explore the creation of social and cultural space for Jews in heretofore inaccessible Pest, though a combination of royal or magnate protection, urban expansion, and changes in the legal status of Jews; the emergence of Ter zv ros as the heart of Pest Jewry; and the contrast between Jewish communal leadership in Pest and buda as an indicator of the transition from an older, c