Equality Drowned in Thermal Water – Environmental Racism and Antisemitism in the Context of Tourism-Centred Modernisation in Interwar North-East Hungary

Abstract

This paper discusses the interrelationship between discourse about the natural environment and nationalist ideologies in interwar Hungary through a case study on the politicisation of bath culture. As a result of the peace treaty that ended World War One, in the 1930s and 1940s, a previously neglected thermal bath town in North-east Hungary became a target for national scale real estate development as well as virulent antisemitism. In order to legitimate antisemitic policy barring Jews from public baths, Hungarian Christian nationalists evoked myths about Jewish bodies being unclean and infectious and used the term ‘Galician Jew’ in reference to Galicia in Eastern Europe, a region historically associated with dirtiness and backwardness. The present study explores the discourse developing around access to thermal resources and argues that the discriminatory bath decrees pushed by the far right were the first step towards the disenfranchisement and eventual extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community.