Berecz, Ágoston The Politics of Early Language Teaching: Hungarian in the Primary Schools of the Late Dual Monarchy (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 358 other Christian feasts, created conditions that favored acts of violence, as huge crowds of people gathered at such times’ (pp. 191–92). I really like this expression of uncertainty. Maybe the pogroms occurred for religious or economic or social reasons; or were dependent on circumstances of the day. Or maybe it was a mixture of all or part. Although the author isn’t entirely a sceptic, I would add that maybe there were other reasons that had to do less with Lithuanian-Jewish relations than with Russian-Lithuanian relations. It is important to recall that Jews were leaving the region in massive numbers to resettle elsewhere. Furthermore, Lithuanian nationalism was on the rise and aimed largely at Poles and Russians as much as Jews. In fact, Jews may have been beaten because of their weakness as much as because they did anything to provoke violence. At the end of the book Staliūnas compares anti-Jewish violence committed in Belarus to that in Lithuania and notes that the violence in Belarus was more intense —more frequent and with more deaths. He blames the absence of traditional ties and inhibitions. In Belarus there were more cities and the wellhoned and conventional forms of inter-group contact were easily ignored. I liked this book a great deal. It doesn’t offer a new vision of pogroms, but it does ask for more careful examination of the pogrom contexts, including the identities of agents and victims. My only criticism is that the author relies perhaps too strongly on local testimonies and therefore neglects to see violence as part of the political discourse in the Empire as a whole. It is a fine study that can serve as a model for historians of pogroms. Jewish Studies Brian Horowitz Tulane University Berecz, Ágoston. The Politics of Early Language Teaching: Hungarian in the Primary Schools of the Late Dual Monarchy. Pasts Inc., Central European University, Budapest, 2013. 284 pp. Map. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $29.95: €24.95: £22.99. Ágoston Berecz’s book is a comprehensive study of Hungarian language teaching policies at primary school level in the non-Magyar communities of Dualist Hungary between 1870 and the First World War. As such, it provides unprecedented insight into the rationale, implementation, pitfalls and paradoxes of the Hungarian state-directed effort at linguistic assimilation. The territory covered corresponds to historical Transylvania, the Banat (Temes and Krassó-Szörény counties) and the three counties west of Transylvania — Bihar, Szilágy and Szatmár. REVIEWS 359 This is a landmark book that takes on a minefield of a subject, which has more often than not been used as nationalist ammunition in conflicting claims over this territory, the spread of Hungarian being viewed as a history of oppression and suppression by the non-Hungarian minorities and as a glorious civilization campaign by Hungarian nationalists. The truth lies somewhere in between and the success or failure of this educational enterprise did not always have much to do with nationalist struggles. A host of other factors shaped grassroots responses to the Hungarian state school system and conditioned its effectiveness: school infrastructure, availability of native Hungarian teachers, existing levels of literacy, degree of linguistic isolation of a given community, opportunities for social mobility, extent of urban interactions. The book thus points out the gap between the desiderata and high expectations of Hungarian statesmen and educationalists and the reality on the ground, which more often than not, had little to do with nationalist rhetoric and purposes and was of a decidedly pragmatic nature. Ágoston Berecz explores how state language acquisition trickled down to village level in Dualist Hungary and how the policies of the Hungarian establishment were implemented to further Hungarian as a state language and the actual degree of their success. The book dwells on the system of confessional schools, which formed the backbone of primary school education in Hungary and pre-dated the assimilationist drive of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century;itspellsouttheiroperationandthechallengestheyencountered;itthen moves on to assess literacy levels and patterns of school attendance; explores state schools, their infrastructure and staff, as well as the web of regulations bothstateandnon-stateschoolswereembeddedinto.Inastatewheremorethan half of the...