Poland and Hungary ─ Jewish Realities Compared

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish communities of Poland and Hungary were the largest in the world and arguably the most culturally vibrant, yet they have rarely been studied comparatively. Despite the obvious similarities, historians have mainly preferred to highlight the differences and emphasize instead the central European character of Hungarian Jewry. Collectively, these essays offer a different perspective. The volume has five sections. The first compares Jewish acculturation and integration in the two countries, analysing the symbiosis of magnates and Jews in each country's elites and the complexity of integration in multi-ethnic environments. The second considers the similarities and differences in Jewish religious life, discussing the impact of Polish hasidism in Hungary and the nature of 'progressive' Judaism in Poland and the Neolog movement in Hungary. Jewish popular culture is the theme of the third section, with accounts of the Jewish involvement in Polish and Hungarian cabaret and film. The fourth examines the deterioration of the situation in both countries in the interwar years, while the final section compares the implementation of the Holocaust and the way it is remembered. The volume concludes with a long interview with the doyen of historians of Hungary, István Deák.

Antony Polonsky is Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and chief historian of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He is co-chair of the editorial collegium of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.

Francois Guesnet is a reader in modern Jewish history in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London and specializes in the early modern and nineteenth-century history of east European and, more specifically, Polish Jews.

Howard Lupovitch is an associate professor of history and director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University. He is the author of Jews at the Crossroads: Tradition and Accommodation during the Golden Age of the Hungarian Nobility, 17291878 (Budapest, 2007) and is currently writing a history of the Neolog movement.