The Jews of Hungary is the first comprehensive history in any
language of the unique Jewish community that has lived in the
Carpathian Basin for eighteen centuries, from Roman times to the
present. Noted historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai, himself
a native of Hungary, tells in this pioneering study the fascinating
story of the struggles, achievements, and setbacks that marked the
flow of history for the Hungarian Jews. He traces their seminal
role in Hungarian politics, finance, industry, science, medicine,
arts, and literature, and their surprisingly rich contributions to
Jewish scholarship and religious leadership both inside Hungary and
in the Western world. In the early centuries of their history
Hungarian Jews left no written works, so Patai had to piece
together a picture of their life up to the sixteenth century based
on documents and reports written by non-Jewish Hungarians and
visitors from abroad. Once Hungarian Jewish literary activity
began, the sources covering the life and work of the Jews rapidly
increased in richness. Patai made full use of the wealth of
information contained in the monumental eighteen-volume series of
the Hungarian Jewish Archives and the other abundant primary
sources available in Latin, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, and
Turkish, the languages in vogue in various periods among the Jews
of Hungary. In his presentation of the modern period he also
examined the literary reflection of Hungarian Jewish life in the
works of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarian novelists, poets,
dramatists, and journalists. Patai's main focus within the overall
history of the Hungarian Jews is their culture and their
psychology. Convinced that what is most characteristic of a people
is the culture which endows its existence with specific coloration,
he devotes special attention to the manifestations of Hungarian
Jewish talent in the various cultural fields, most significantly
literature, the arts, and scholarship. Based on the available
statistical data Patai shows that from the nineteenth century, in
all fields of Hungarian culture, Jews played leading roles not
duplicated in any other country. Patai also shows that in the
Hungarian Jewish culture a specific set of psychological
motivations had a highly significant function. The Hungarian
national character trait of emphatic patriotism was present in an
even more fervent form in the Hungarian Jewish mind. Despite their
centuries-old struggle against anti-Semitism, and especially from
the nineteenth century on, Hungarian Jews remained convinced that
they were one hundred percent Hungarians, differing in nothing but
denominational variation from the Catholic and Protestant
Hungarians. This mindset kept them apart and isolated from the
Jewries of the Western world until overtaken by the tragedy of the
Holocaust in the closing months of World War II.
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