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rfmcdonaldJonathan Edelstein links to Yehuda Lahav's Ha'aretz article "The quarrel in Herzl's homeland". Hungary is home to a long-settled Jewish community (Wikipedia, Jewish Virtual Library) which, even after the Holocaust, includes roughly a hundred thousand people and is the fourth-largest national population of Jews in the European Union after France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Post-Communist Hungary is ethnically homogeneous than ever before. More, linguistic assimilation of once-distinct communities has been growing, as Antal Paulik and Judith Olymosi describe in their "Language policy in Hungary" (PDF format). Even so, the reemergence of Hungarian minorities after Communism has led to a new self-confidence for many of these groups, not least of which are the Jews. Hungarian Jews, like their non-Jewish counterparts, tend to be secular, with very low rates of religious practice. Hungarian Jews are arguably less a religious community and more an ethnic community. Accordingly, one Gabor Deak has started a petition to gain recognition of Hungarian Jews as a national minroity in Hungary.
This is controversial. Fears of anti-Semitism play a major role, but so too does the determinatino of Hungary's Jewish clerics to maintain a stranglehold over Jewish identity.
Legitimately, defenders of the existing system, wherein Jews are represented as a religious minority, fear that establishing a separate identity might cut into their funding. Rather illegitimately, many of them also wish to maintain a stranglehold over Jewish identity in Hungary. Jonathan is right to point out that the question of how to balance the competing calls of ethnic and religious solidarity in the case of Hungary's Jews has to be answered. By the same measure, the reality of different views on what it means to be Jewish has to be acknowledged.
Post-Communist Hungary is ethnically homogeneous than ever before. More, linguistic assimilation of once-distinct communities has been growing, as Antal Paulik and Judith Olymosi describe in their "Language policy in Hungary" (PDF format). Even so, the reemergence of Hungarian minorities after Communism has led to a new self-confidence for many of these groups, not least of which are the Jews. Hungarian Jews, like their non-Jewish counterparts, tend to be secular, with very low rates of religious practice. Hungarian Jews are arguably less a religious community and more an ethnic community. Accordingly, one Gabor Deak has started a petition to gain recognition of Hungarian Jews as a national minroity in Hungary.
This is controversial. Fears of anti-Semitism play a major role, but so too does the determinatino of Hungary's Jewish clerics to maintain a stranglehold over Jewish identity.
In the opinion of Peter Feldmeier, the chairman of the Jewish community organization, "The religious connection is the decisive link for the majority of Jews." The young people who initiated the petition for registering the Jews as a national minority disagree. They point to the fact that in the most recent national census, only about 15,000 people listed themselves as "Jewish" when asked what religion they practiced (even though the census did not note the names of respondents, and the declaration of religious identification remained incognito). Deak says the Jews predominantly or exclusively maintain a cultural or historic link to Judaism, and it is only right that they be permitted to do so without dependence on the organization of religious communities.
Legitimately, defenders of the existing system, wherein Jews are represented as a religious minority, fear that establishing a separate identity might cut into their funding. Rather illegitimately, many of them also wish to maintain a stranglehold over Jewish identity in Hungary. Jonathan is right to point out that the question of how to balance the competing calls of ethnic and religious solidarity in the case of Hungary's Jews has to be answered. By the same measure, the reality of different views on what it means to be Jewish has to be acknowledged.
