Hungarian Jews Research Articles

Viable Cooperation or Unscrupulous Service? Motivations for Albert Bereczky’s Activity in Church Governance

Albert Bereczky is one of the controversial figures in the 20th-century history of the Hungarian Reformed Church. Bereczky was a genuine and authentic leader of those who fought for the inner spiritual renewal of the church between the two world wars, a church organizer, a well-known and respected preacher, who saved many by risking his life during the deportation of Hungarian Jews to extermination camps, for which he was posthumously awarded the honorary title “Righteous Among the Nations” from the Yad Vashem. However, the communist state apparatus established after World War II found in him the person who, by placing him at the head of the Reformed Church, could bring about a radical reduction of the public and social role of the Church almost without any resistance. So, the question arises: how and why could Bereczky, whose Christian commitment was hard to question, become the servant of the dictatorial state apparatus with its atheistic ideology? Our study attempts to record the possible intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that might explain this dilemma, while also providing a general insight into Albert Bereczky’s life. Keywords: Bishop Albert Bereczky, Zoltán Tildy, Church–state relationship, communist persecution of Christians, collaboration

Exegi monumentum: monuments of Jews in public spaces in Budapest as texts (1880–1944)

ABSTRACT The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a period when artistic endeavours, aimed at expressing a national identity, were thriving in Hungary. The Jewish minority of Budapest also found it important to be present in public spaces. A couple of years after the emancipation of Hungarian Jews, the first statues of Jewish personalities appeared on the streets of Budapest. Who were these statues dedicated to? Who were the artists commissioned, and who paid for them? What were the invisible texts beyond reading the statues as texts? What happened to the public monuments during the Second World War? This paper aims to respond to these questions as a part of a research project mapping Jewish interventions in public art in Budapest.

The Humanitarian Mission by Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Hungary (1914-1921)

The purpose of the research paper is coverage of the process of deployment of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s humanitarian mission in Hungary, determination of its scope and addressees, evaluation of aid results.
 The scientific novelty is lies in the fact that for the first time the JDC’s humanitarian mission is shown in the Hungarian territories – during the First World War, as part of Austria-Hungary, after – as an independent State. The JDC’s role in helping both Hungarian Jews and refugees from the territories who suffered from hostilities is shown. The volumes of assistance, its forms and the main addressers of its receipt are disclosed.
 Conclusions. In spite of insurmountable difficulties during World War I and in the post-War years that followed it; in spite of the lack of unity and of many internal differences; in spite of negative attitudes from various governments – in spite of all these obstacles, American Jewry was able not only to deliver general organized relief to the starving European Jews (including Hungarian Jews), but also to assist in the organization of the machinery for the transmission of private relief. Indeed, on November 13, 1919, Dr. Bogen wrote in his report: “The most essential factor in this rehabilitation is the establishment of the necessary means to transmit the relief so generously proffered by American Jewry, the organization of the transmission system”.
 JDC for the first time had brought together in the common task of mercy American Jews of all shades of opinion. The experience of these years had developed an organization and had recruited dedicated personnel. A small but adaptable staff of diverse background and experience brought together a corps of experts ready to take on additional assignments. A network of affiliated Jewish organizations was prepared to assume responsibility for reconstruction, but was also available in the event of unexpected crisis.
 Aids for the Jews of Hungary was, though small, but very tangible. Local Jews, as well as refugees from neighboring territories (especially Galicia) received much-needed support. Participation in the program of the European Children’s Fund saved tens of thousands of children and their families from death. At the same time, this program had its continuation in the future. All this created the basis for the transition to the stage of reconstruction, which, if possible, we will highlight in further studies.

РАУЛЬ ВАЛЛЕНБЕРГ – РЯТІВНИК ЄВРЕЇВ БУДАПЕШТУ В РОКИ ГОЛОКОСТУ

The article is devoted to the rescue of Hungarian Jews who were doomed to deportation and extermination during the Nazi occupation of the country. The methodology is based on the use of interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of world history, psychology, ethics, as well as theoretical and conceptual developments of researchers of Raoul Wallenberg’s biography. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian historiography, the figure of Raoul Wallenberg is considered as the savior of Hungarian Jewry. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, two ghettos were created in Budapest for privileged and ordinary Jews. In the «International Ghetto» lived those persons who were under the protection of diplomatic missions of neutral countries. The rest of the Jews were gathered in the «Great Ghetto». The saving mission of R. Wallenberg consisted in the fact that he issued Swedish documents and transferred people to the «International Ghetto», where access to the Nazis and Nilashists was prohibited. During the «death marches» organized by A. Eichmann’s team, the Swedish diplomat led out of the columns and removed from the trains those Jews who received «protective documents» (passports, certificates), and also wrote down the names of those who asked for help and rescue. In total, R. Wallenberg managed to issue 4,500 «protection documents» and save Jews from both ghettos, i.e. more than 100,000 people, from deportation. The story of a man who gave up his own comfort and well-being in order to save unfamiliar Hungarian Jews rightfully remains indicative for the current generation, as it proves that humanity, compassion, and helping the needy do not have a statute of limitations, but can manifest themselves unexpectedly, unexpectedly, not only for those around them, but also for himself. For Wallenberg, these qualities became defining, because he spared no effort, no time, no money to protect people. He used every opportunity to save those condemned to deportation and death. The young man did not leave Budapest during the siege of Soviet troops and stayed in the city until the last. After all, he understood his rescue mission and tried to save the lives of as many Jews as possible.

The Khazar Ancestry of Hungarian Jews

Abstract In late nineteenth century Hungary, progressive Jewish (Neolog) scholars wrote several articles in Neolog journals publicly supporting theories of common ancestry and race with Hungarians. They created a unique identity for themselves through discussions of common origin and history, making Jews into Hungarians. One of their main theories was that of Khazar ancestry, which, despite being controversial even in its own time, enabled stories of a common Judeo-Hungarian past and race to emerge. The Hungarian nationalism that was key to their self-definition underlay all arguments concerning the nature and ancestry of Hungarian Jewish identity. They not only created histories compatible with those of the Hungarians but also molded them into something new. Examining their narratives, we can rethink the conceptual framework of the modern Jewish experience and see the successes of integration from the minority’s point of view. In this way, we can detect another perspective on history, one that does not define the modern European Jewish experience as a story of either the success or the failure of assimilation as measured by the severity of anti-Semitism but allows the minority’s voice come to light.

ПОРЯДОК ТРУДОВЫХ ЛАГЕРЕЙ («ОДИН ДЕНЬ ИВАНА ДЕНИСОВИЧА» А.И. СОЛЖЕНИЦЫНА И «БЕЗ СУДЬБЫ» ИМРЕ КЕРТЕСА)

Авторы настоящего сообщения рассматривают общие приемы создания лагерного мира, поэтических средств (фразеологизмов, метафор и сравнений) изображения работы заключенного в таких выдающихся произведениях лагерной прозы, как «Один день Ивана Денисовича» А.И. Солженицына и «Без судьбы» Имре Кертеса. В фокусе анализа находится хаотический поток и уничтожающий человека порядок, каторжный труд и мирная жизнь. В ходе анализа внимание авторов статьи концентрируется на мотивах, образах и тропах, связанных с эпизодами работы в повести «Один день Ивана Денисовича». Отбираются те конструкции, которые в известной мере перекликаются с самым известным венгерским произведением лагерной литературы. The author of this paper examines the general methods of creating metaphors and similes for the manifestation of experience in the outstanding works of camp prose “One Day of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Fatelessness” by Imre Kertész. The analysis focuses on such contrasting images of the presentation of campmen and guards, as the chaotic flow and murderous order, hard labor and peaceful life. Solzhenitsyn’s frugal camp prose is balanced not only by the stylistic peculiarities of the narrator’s speech, but also by the tropes that reinterpret traditional poetic means. In our analysis, the focus is on the tropes in the text of the novel “One Day of Ivan Denisovich.” We selected the verbal constructions that echo the most famous work of Hungarian camp literature. Thus, metaphorization serves in modern literature also for intertextual tasks. But the Hungarian writer, on the other hand, faces the problem of how to tell his own story, which is shared by millions of people, without the cliches of the literary canon. “Staying in Hell” is how the character’s days in the labor camp are described. The protagonist of “Fatelessness” by Imre Kertész, is Gyuri Köves, an adolescent, who must understand the purpose of his hard work in the camp. For this he first has to familiarize himself with the alien world and master the terms and reinvent them. This process is presented through similes and metaphors related to human actions. It may seem strange to compare the works of two writers who have little in common: both Nobel laureates are writing about genocide, both writers experienced the horrors of concentration camp life. At first glance, the authors talk about different camps: Imre Kertész depicts the deportation of Hungarian Jews to fascist concentration camps ordered by the German occupiers, in Solzhenitsyn’s story the place of action is one of the Gulag camps, in which there were political prisoners, “unreliable” people, condemned as enemies Русская и зарубежная литературы: сопоставительные планы 93 of the Soviet people. However, with a seemingly obvious difference, the essence of the camps is the same: in both cases it is a mechanism of repression, a means of physical and moral destruction of a human being. In the works of Russian and Hungarian writers, a common place is found — when depicting the life of prisoners, the authors pay a lot of attention to the description of the work. For Solzhenitsyn and Kertész, labor becomes a means of revealing the personality of the prisoner, it is in the situation of work that the philosophy of the hero, his attitude to the world and to others is revealed. Thus the typological similarity of the two authors lies in the fact that they show their characters in the circumstances of unfreedom and labor for them becomes the essence of being primarily human and, of course, social.

Two versions of Marxist concrete psychology: Politzer and Mérei compared.

This article will compare the life and work of two Marxist psychologists of the midtwentieth century, George Politzer (1903-1942) and Ferenc Mérei (1909-1986). Both were Hungarian Jews who were educated at the French Sorbonne. They were both involved in covert activities related to the French Communist movement in the 1920 and 1930s. As young communist intellectuals, they combined Marxist ideology with the need to elaborate a new psychology. I present their work as an alternative to better known versions of Marxist psychology, namely, Freudo-Marxism and Soviet action theories. Unlike these theories, Politzer and Mérei created a partly empirical, partly theoretical psychological oeuvre that operationalized the ideas of a concrete dramatic psychology anchored in the actual social life of humans. Politzer and Mérei shared desire for a psychology that is rooted in dynamics, changes, and interactions-a psychology that is rooted in the human drama, rather than in abstractions of academic laboratory psychology, and in the static topography of Freud. For Politzer, the critique of traditional psychology was mainly conceptual. Mérei looked for concrete psychology in data from field work in social psychology and from applied clinical research. The work of Mérei provided an empirical, concrete psychology, which eventually led to an influx of many new psychologists within the field in Hungary. Politzer's contributions, in contrast, remained largely conceptual and philosophical. The main message of their work is that it is an almost impossible task to combine a Marxist-Communist engagement with a commitment toward traditional civic values of enlightenment and rationality. The combination of social-political commitment and an analysis of concrete human interactions remained a formal combination, rather than a real synthesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Information About the Holocaust in Hungary Before the German Occupation, Revisited

ABSTRACT The question of what was known in Hungary about the Holocaust has been a mainstay of research on that chapter since the time of the Kasztner libel trial in the mid-1950s. New studies on various aspects of the subject and new sources that have become available make it worthwhile to revisit it. It is now clear that news about the Nazi persecution of Jews reached Hungary soon after it began and continued to arrive in the period preceding the German occupation in spring 1944. This included information about the massacre of Hungarian Jews at Kam'yanets-Podilskyy in 1941 and Jews in Novi Sad in the Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia in 1942. From the second half of 1941 through the occupation, Hungarian soldiers and Hungarian Jewish labor servicemen learned about mass murder of Jews and brought news back to Hungary. The destruction of Jews was discussed in the Hungarian Jewish press. The activists of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee, led by Kasztner and Otto Komoly, were also a conduit for information. Very specific information, including about Auschwitz, reached Hungary in January 1944 when the Hashomer Hatsair leader from Będzin, Chajka Klinger, who had escaped to Hungary, gave her testimony. Around that time, Zionist youth movement emissaries were sent from Budapest to the provinces and, after encountering Klinger's message, passed it on. Despite the availability of much information, as Yehuda Bauer explained many years ago in an article, there is a gap between information and knowledge. To a large extent this gap regarding the events of the Holocaust, which a great many Hungarian Jews did not bridge, derived from the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust.

Budapest’s Living Memorial and the Reperformance of Countermemory

Condemned as a “forgery of history,” Budapest’s “Memorial to the Victims of the German Invasion of 1944” depicts Hungary as a victim of Nazi aggression, ignoring the state’s active participation in the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others. Since 2014, activists have maintained the nearby living memorial, inviting visitors to leave mementoes and converse about Hungary’s past, current events, and the national future. Reperforming the official monument, the living memorial disrupts the government’s problematic revisionism. We theorize reperformance as a tool for engaging the politics of contested memory and modeling democratic culture.

Jelinek’s Rechnitz and Greenberg’s The Testament: Two Executions of One Massacre

Jelinek’s Rechnitz and Greenberg’s The Testament: Two Executions of One Massacre Hartmut Heep On March 24, 1945, approximately one thousand Jewish forced labourers were transported ten miles from Köszeg in Hungary to the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria on March 11, 1938, and throughout World War II, thousands of Austrians fought alongside German soldiers. Soviet troops reached the outskirts of Vienna by April 3, 1945 and liberated the Austrian capital ten days later. The deported Hungarian Jews were supposed to fortify the southeast trench of Rechnitz, in order to impede the Red Army invasion. Severely weakened and malnourished, one hundred eighty of the male Jews were considered unfit to perform this manual labour. It was decided that they had to be eliminated. That same night of March 24, 1945, the Countess Margit Thyssen-Batthyány (1911–89), the mistress of the Nazi Hans Joachim Oldenburg, hosted a soirée at her castle in Rechnitz. The countess, the daughter of Heinrich Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, was born in the castle. In 1933, Margit married Count Ivan von Batthyány. Like the family Thyssen, the Batthyánys, whose noble roots can be traced back to the ninth century, are associated with power and money. The countess was known for her close ties to SS officers and Nazi collaborators. Among the invited regular officers was the local Nazi chief Franz Podezin, who handed out guns to the guests. The British journalist David Litchfield suggests that fourteen to sixteen of the guests murdered the one hundred eighty unfit Jews during the party. Eighteen Jews, who had been forced to bury the victims in a mass grave, were themselves killed the following day. The grave was never found, nor were the perpetrators. On March 29, 1945, Rechnitz surrendered to the Soviet Army without much resistance. Auschwitz had been liberated on January 27, 1945. The facts related to this event remain murky. Walter Manoschek, for instance, discovered inconsistencies between the official court files and the judgement of the [End Page 476] Austrian People’s Court. The German magazine Der Spiegel quotes the German antisemitism researchers Wolfgang Benz and Winfried Garscha of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Both argue that the party guests did not participate in the murder. The one hundred eighty murdered Jews were too weak to work or march and therefore, according to official Nazi policy, “were murdered everywhere at the time” (Spiegel). Eventually, the South African journalist Steven Krawitz confirms Litchfield’s theory. Szilvia Pais-Horváth recaptures the research of the last descendant of a Rechnitz victim, the Hungarian surgeon Gábor Vadász. All sixteen attempts to find the mass grave have so far been unsuccessful. Pais-Horváth reports that “some of the prisoners were beaten to death; others were hunted down or shot in the head.” She also states, “prisoners from the castle cellar were ordered to dig graves. One of them told an organization helping those who had been deported in 1945–46 that they dug up nine L-shaped graves, two meters wide and two meters deep.” Franz Podezin, the alleged mastermind of the massacre, disappeared in 1945, Pais-Horváth assumes “with the help of the Baroness.” Margit Thyssen-Batthyány moved to Switzerland, where she died peacefully in 1989. This massacre has been the focus of several artistic productions. The film Totschweigen (1994), directed by Margarete Heinrich and Eduard Erne, is a documentary in search of the mass grave. Unable to find it, even though Heinrich and Erne participated in the search, the documentary shifts its focus to interviews with the local population. Katya Krylova calls Totschweigen “a powerful visual language for the repression of memory in Rechnitz” (70). The documentary leaves no doubt that the grave is a metaphor for a missing chapter in Austrian history. Elfriede Jelinek’s play Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) (2008) presents a paradigm shift in the traditional Holocaust discussion. Neither the search for the grave nor the suffering of the Jewish victims takes centre stage. Her play intends to extort a confession from the local Austrian perpetrators, whose collective memory has gone missing just as much as the...

The Hungarian-Jewish Social Contract, its Rupture, and Jewish Death Rituals

This article explores the supposedly reciprocal social contract between “Greater Hungary” and its Jewish population from the “Golden Age” of the Dual Monarchy to its rupture in the Holocaust. The afterlife of this broken contract will be addressed through the upkeep and neglect of cemeteries in Subcarpathia and Hungary proper. Along the way, I present memoiristic vignettes that illustrate the challenge of loyalty to state / military authority and death rituals in the time of the 1918-1919 Hungarian-Romanian War, Jewish mourning in the context of Czechoslovakia’s loss of Subcarpathia, and the disjuncture between the normal praxis of death ritual and the spectre of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as the ritual contrast to Hungarian Jews who were deported, but not to Auschwitz. I also turn to the historical research of Tim Cole and Daniel Rosenthal, in conjunction with Hungarian (especially North-Transylvanian) Holocaust memoirs, to reflect on Holocaust-era suicide as a mode of victims’ resistance to their brutalization by Hungarian gendarmes -- the pinnacle of the betrayal of the erstwhile contract between Hungarian state authority and its Jewish population.

John C. Swanson. Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.

John C. Swanson. <i>Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.</i>

Danilo Kish's Fictional Self аnd the Father's Figure („Garden. Ashes“ and „Hourglass“)

The article examines two novels from the trilogy of Danilo Kish ("Early Care", "Garden, ashes" and the Hourglass) - a writer and essayist, the descendant of a Hungarian Jew and a Montenegrin mother. Both in his novels and in his essays and short stories, the centre of many cultures and identities, a follower of Kafka, Joyce, the Tick and whose main themes always carry the shade of nostalgia, the marks of the vanished world, which is experienced as the only thing dear to the artist. The theme of the disappearing world of Hungarian Jews is told from three different points of view in the trilogy. For the unfortified Self in the trilogy, the disappearance of the father is connected with the wavering of the identity, with the search for grounds for the very existence. From the narration of horror, the apocalyptic crack of life and meaning, the lurking death that transcends everything because it is finality. But amid the devastation and doubt of the written word, there remains the hope that the story provokes the reader, outlining the space and giving meaning to pain, sacrifice and death.

Mengele's suitcase

On January 9, 2014, I received a call at my home in the small town of Alfeld (Leine), Central Germany. On the phone was Barbara Riepl, an acquaintance from Munich, and she had a truly exciting story waiting for me.11This story has been described in great detail in my book “Mengels Koffer. Eine Spurensuche” (Osburg Verlag, Hamburg, 2019) as well as in the documentary “Abgezockt! Die Auschwitz-Tagebücher”, which was broadcast on the German TV channel ZDFinfo Doku on the December 3, 2020. The grandfather of her best friend Nicole had been a prominent Hungarian Jew who had been deported to Auschwitz during World War II. There, he became a prisoner doctor forced to assist the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in his infamous human experiments. Several years after the war, he deposited a slew of documents in a Swiss safe. That safe had remained untouched for decades, but it was to be unsealed soon. Riepl went on to claim that her friend had entrusted her personally with these documents and asked if I, as a historian, would be interested in examining the documents and—if need arose—help to publish them.

Hungarian Jewish Stories of Origin: Samuel Kohn, the Khazar Connection and the Conquest of Hungary

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Khazar ancestry of European Jewry was a popular idea that particularly resonated throughout the discourse surrounding Hungary’s national origin and belonging. One of this discourse’s critical questions concerned whether Magyars and Jews were divided or united by ethnicity or religion: this paper demonstrates how Samuel Kohn (1841-1920), an important rabbi-scholar of the time, participated in this discussion by arguing for a common origin of the two groups. Kohn asserted that the Khazar ancestry of Hungarian Jews comprises both an ethnic and a religious connection. He considered two complementary questions: whether Hungarians and Jews possessed common ethnic origins and thereby belonged to the same race, and whether Magyars converted to Judaism during the Khazar era, i.e., the belief that Hungarians and Jews shared a common religion in the past. The contemporary political atmosphere magnified the significance of Kohn’s contribution.

The Legacy of the Numerus Clausus One Hundred Years On

The Legacy of the Numerus Clausus One Hundred Years On

Coming of Age During the Holocaust: The Adult Roles and Responsibilities of Young Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau

ABSTRACT This article develops a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which teenage Hungarian Jews responded to persecution in Auschwitz-Birkenau by examining survival mechanisms through the lens of young people and their accelerated development into adults. Rejecting traditional approaches that view young people as passive victims, it argues that they employed a variety of mechanisms more commonly associated with adults for survival, rooted in their fitness to work; the strength of their individual and collective memories, emotions, and imagination; and their ability to maintain and forge family and other relationships. Building on recent trends in Holocaust research exploring the complexities of Jewish agency, this article recognizes that each young person responded in his or her own individual way to the dehumanizing environment of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As such, there was no single, standard experience of persecution or survival for young people. There are, however, common themes that deserve closer examination, based on a wide range of first-hand survivor testimonies. Exploring these themes, not only does this article recognize the actions of young Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it also seeks to reconceptualize survival by acknowledging both the physical and mental ways that were the domain of adults in normal times yet became the norm for young people in their mechanisms to cope in the camp. In doing so, it advances a more humane and subjective understanding of their experiences and builds a more accurate and realistic history of survival.

Building the Great Synagogue of Pest: Moorish Revival Architecture and the European-Ottoman Alliance in the Crimean War

In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the search for a symbolic Jewish presence in the urban centers of Central Europe led to the emergence of a monumental synagogue architecture in the Moorish revival style. This new architectural convention experienced a sudden breakthrough in April and May 1854, when it was adopted almost simultaneously in the plans for three major synagogues to be built in Leipzig, Vienna, and Pest. In this article, I will demonstrate that the social and aesthetic agendas of the three community leaderships were interconnected and that they must be understood in the context of the international political events transpiring at the time. In the spring of 1854, Europe witnessed the military and propagandistic run-up to the Crimean War. In the spirit of liberal patriotism, Hungarian Jews identified with the Ottomans against the Czarist Empire and saw the contemporary Islamic-Christian alliance as a globalizing extension of the emancipation process.

Rethinking the Dilemma of Bombing Auschwitz: Support, Opposition, and Reservation

The first two transports of Hungarian Jews arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. The extermination camp was located within range of the Allies' bomber aircraft, leading to demands to bomb the site. The fact that the extermination camp was never bombed, along with the dramatic impact of the murder of Hungary's Jews during the final stages of World War II, has turned the failure to bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau into a symbol of the powerlessness of the free world and of Jewish leadership to rescue the Jews of Europe. This essay presents a new approach to this episode, based on documents in the archives of American Jewish activists involved in the issue of the bombing of the camp—above all, Leon Kubowitzki, who headed the World Jewish Congress's Rescue Department. From the documents, we learn that leading figures in the Jewish and Zionist leadership asked that the U.S. administration not bomb Auschwitz, preferring other forms of military action by partisans or paratroopers against the camp. While a number of scholars have noted this position of the WJC, most treat it as peripheral. Contrary to the commonly accepted scholarly belief, the course of action taken by U.S. Jewish leaders was a significant strategic political step designed to damage the capability of the extermination camp by means other than bombing.

A Scottish Millennial Mission to Jews

AbstractThis paper investigates how the missionaries of the Church of Scotland sought to convert the Jews in Hungary. The research studies carefully Adolph Saphir's change of faith, his theological views, and his work. His family was the first “fruit” of Scottish missionary activity among the Hungarian Jews in 1843. After scrutinizing his conversion, the study proceeds to map his sphere of work as a missionary. In particular, it examines his millennial views, which gave the impetus to his missionary activity. Finally, the paper demonstrates that he became an ardent supporter of mission to the Jews not only in Britain but also in Central Europe.