János Pelle. Vérvád, hisztéria, népítélet: “Zsidókérdés” Magyarországon 1945-ben és 1946-ban

Abstract

According to a recent public opinion survey carried out in November and December 2019 by Medián Opinion and Market Research in Hungary, 20 percent of Hungarians are strongly antisemitic, while 16 percent are mildly so.1 This report makes especially timely the publication of Professor János Pelle’s monograph on the history of the anti-Jewish violence that took place in Hungary in 1945−46, immediately after the end of World War II. A year earlier, in May and June 1944, about 425,000 had been deported, and by the end of the war, 565,000 of historic Hungary’s 725,000 Jews had perished in the Holocaust.János Pelle is a recognized authority on Hungarian Holocaust history and is the author of several books on the topic, one of which was translated and published in English.2 In this monograph—the second on the topic, with the first having been published in 1995—Pelle offers case studies indicating that the postwar antisemitic mass hysteria that erupted at numerous localities and led to pogrom-like violence was fueled by traditional antisemitic belief in the various derivatives of the medieval blood libel prompted by Christians’ xenophobic fear of Jews. The economic deprivation of society in 1945−46 led to scapegoating, which focused on the survivors of the Holocaust. According to the author, the Communist Party and the political police under its control were instrumental in fomenting pogroms directly or indirectly, as one means among others to consolidate their power and influence.Although, as the monograph’s title indicates, the author concentrates on 1945 and 1946, in the first part of the book Pelle postulates a continuity between 1882 and 1948 in the mass psychology of antisemitism that embraced the myth of ritual murder. The charge of blood libel first appeared in 1882 in Tiszaeszlár, and at “the historical arc’s other end” (22) was Szegvár, where in 1948 the villagers baselessly accused their Jewish neighbors of murdering a young bride. The Jews “‘shed her blood’” (23). Consequently, they were chased out of the village. In Tiszaeszlár, a village on the River Tisza, a young servant girl’s disappearance was attributed by the peasants and the local authorities to members of the local Jewish community. They were accused of murdering Eszter Solymosi for ritualistic reasons. Pelle points out that while the courts found the accused innocent of the charge, due to the fact that the child was never found, dead or alive, her story, the product of mass hysteria, became a part of the antisemitic folklore “with which it became possible to incite unscrupulous behaviors even after decades,” as late as between 1945 and 1948 (22, 24). The Tiszaeszlár episode, followed by two years of anti-Jewish violence at numerous localities in Hungary, also became the signpost for Hungarian political antisemitism. Before the start of World War I, local outbreaks of blood libel hysteria became frequent, and the author speculates “that the public was informed of only a portion of these occurrences” (25). Pelle also claims that during the last months of the war, the hardship and approaching defeat brought forth a search for scapegoats and the resurgence of the blood libel. Antisemitic politicians, however, recognized that blood libel hysteria had the potential to instigate uncontrollable and destructive mass violence and could lead to sympathy among some of the voters toward the Jewish victims. For these reasons, after the war they favored “‘solving the Jewish Question’ by legal means through the framing of discriminative Jewish laws while keeping hatred of the Jews alive” (27).This explanation for the interwar anti-Jewish legislations is novel and convincing, though it disregards the pogroms instigated by paramilitary groups during the so-called White Terror in 1919−20. It would have been useful, however, had the author specified some of the localities where end-of-the-war antisemitic blood-libel riots broke out, since by November 1918 practically the whole countryside was in rebellion. A similar situation existed by the end of 1917. The November 1917 issue of the popular humor magazine Borsszem Jankó noted that only villages with no Jewish inhabitants were spared from beatings of Jews.3 The nationwide antisemitic outbreaks in 1917−18 may also indicate that it was not solely the blood libel rumor that stimulated the peasant violence. Rather, the wartime hardships generated traditional jacqueries, spontaneous agrarian protests without political goals, and these were accompanied by the ever-present peasant cultural tradition of scapegoating Jews and engaging in pogroms.4In World War II, Hungary was an ally of Germany even before the German occupation of the country in March 1944 when, as Pelle points out, the primary goal of Döme Sztójay’s government was the “final solution” of the “Jewish Question.” In antisemitic propaganda, the blood libel accusation flourished in some newspapers, books, and plays. Their message appealed to those who were already influenced by the official antisemitism of the laws and decrees concerning Jews. “Their impact lasted until the end of the war and for years thereafter” (46). The author claims that in March 1944, when the Red Army reached Hungary’s pre-Trianon borders, the public, nurtured on antisemitism, viewed the coming invasion as the arrival of the “Jewish threat,” the Jewish vengeance. People, therefore, acquiesced to the deportation of the Jews and saw the government’s policy as a “necessary evil.” Since there is little information about how Hungarian bystanders felt about the deportations, Pelle points convincingly to their complicity as evidenced by the behavior of bystanders in the postwar pogroms in Hungary (47). His methodological approach here is reminiscent of the Annales School’s “longue durée” that claims that social behavior and mentalities do not change overnight. Evidence from one period can be applied to another that lacks similar information. One of the few wartime sources Pelle could have referred to is the wartime diary of the Jewish public intellectual and politician Miksa Fenyő, in which bystander reaction was recorded in several instances, bearing out Pelle’s assumption. According to one entry on January 2, 1945, two weeks before the liberation of the ghetto by Soviet troops, “Two deaconesses are engaged in a conversation. One says, ‘It is certain that the Arrow Cross men are getting ready to commit something heinous against the ghetto.’ The other [replied], ‘I feel sorry for the unfortunates. But perhaps it is better this way because they will have no opportunity for vengeance.’”5It is an irony of Hungarian history that soon after the end of World War II, as Pelle points out, those Jews who had survived the Holocaust, returned from deportation, and reclaimed their lost properties were increasingly blamed by the masses “for the lost war, for the depredations of the occupying troops, for the misery, for the shortages of goods, for the deterioration of public safety, and the inflation” (84). The postwar crises, therefore, contributed to the perpetuation of antisemitism and resuscitated the blood libel and the hysteria that upheld the collective culpability of Jews. As Pelle demonstrates in the monograph, it resulted in violence against Jews, including lynching, and the destruction of their property.While 1945 is presented as a time when the blood libel was already part of the public discourse, the author identifies May 8, 1946 as the date of the first major outbreak of postwar mass hysteria based on blood libel and locates it in several Budapest districts. In one of the working-class districts, the people’s verdict led to a lynching. Pelle writes, “from there it spread throughout the country, and at several locations [the blood libel] served as an excuse to carry out pogroms and lynchings against Jews who returned from deportation” (89).General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi, the leader of the Communist Party and shaper of its program, although of Jewish origin, tried to deflect popular antisemitism and redirected it at the survivors who then became scapegoats, collectively accused of being black marketeers and speculators (94). The Communists’ tactic of reviving the so-called Jewish Question contributed to the Party’s strategy of mass organization and political domination. In their quest, they even welcomed former rank-and-file Arrow Cross members into the party (81). To buttress his claim, Pelle weaves into his narrative excerpts from contemporary speeches, news reports, and other primary sources.Popular antisemitism was also reinforced by the influx of former Jewish forced laborers and survivors into the police, prosecutors’ offices, and the people’s courts that were set up to judge Hungarians charged with war crimes. The criminal arraignments were often based on denunciations made by Jewish victims. Pelle notes, “it is no surprise that the accepted wisdom considered the people’s courts as instruments of ‘Jewish vengeance’” (101). The author could have added, however, that the accepted wisdom was the wisdom of the antisemites, and most of the Jewish survivors working for the repressive government organs and the courts merely wanted to see to it that after losing their loved ones in the Holocaust, justice was carried out.6In the last part of the book, Pelle covers the two major pogroms in detail, one of which broke out on May 21, 1946, in Kunmadaras and was generated by a blood libel rumor. Hysteria led to the lynching of three and the wounding of more than a dozen of the eighty Jewish survivors who had returned to the village. During the investigation, the perpetrators claimed that they were the victims and needed to be protected against the Jews (107). The other major pogrom broke out in the industrial city of Miskolc on July 30, 1946, and was instigated by the Communist Party and the political police. Here the fired-up crowds carried out the “people’s verdict” that, according to Pelle, had no tradition in Hungary before 1944. This claim is imprecise, as during the White Terror there were numerous instances of antisemitic lynchings. The best known was the triple execution that took place on August 27, 1919, in Fonyód, a village by Lake Balaton. The victims were falsely accused of being active supporters of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and were lynched by a mob in the wake of a people’s verdict.7Ironically, in Miskolc the working-class perpetrators of the lynching of an alleged Jewish black marketeer also believed, just as in Kunmadaras, that they were also the victims of “Jewish vengeance” (160). As the unrest continued, a Jewish first lieutenant of the police was lynched on August 1. Pelle claims that he was sacrificed by the Communist authorities (164).Reading Pelle’s monograph about the anti-Jewish violence during 1945 and 1946, it is easy to conclude that the pogroms of Kunmadaras and Miskolc were just the tip of the iceberg. A statement Pelle makes earlier in his book could be considered a fitting conclusion to the whole: “The passions that then surfaced in Hungary were present in the collective consciousness until the 1960s and through transpositions have impacts even today” (51). The statistics mentioned earlier bear out Pelle’s observation in this important book, which I believe should be translated and published in English.