At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish communities of Poland and Hungary were the largest in the world and arguably the most culturally vibrant, yet they have rarely been studied comparatively. Despite the obvious similarities, historians have mainly preferred to highlight the differences and emphasize instead the central European character of Hungarian Jewry. Collectively, these essays offer a different perspective. The volume has five sections. The first compares Jewish acculturation and integration in the two countries, analysing the symbiosis of magnates and Jews in each country's elites and the complexity of integration in multi-ethnic environments. The second considers the similarities and differences in Jewish religious life, discussing the impact of Polish hasidism in Hungary and the nature of 'progressive' Judaism in Poland and the Neolog movement in Hungary. Jewish popular culture is the theme of the third section, with accounts of the Jewish involvement in Polish and Hungarian cabaret and film. The fourth examines the deterioration of the situation in both countries in the interwar years, while the final section compares the implementation of the Holocaust and the way it is remembered. The volume concludes with a long interview with the doyen of historians of Hungary, Istvan Deak.

About the Author
Francois Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History, University College London. He is chair of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and secretary of the European Association for Jewish Studies and has held research fellowships and visiting teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dartmouth College, Potsdam University, Vilnius University, and the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. He is the editor, with Jerzy Tomaszewski, of Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present (2022). Howard Lupovitch is an associate professor of history and director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University. He is the author of Jews at the Crossroads: Tradition and Accommodation during the Golden Age of the Hungarian Nobility, 1729-1878 (Budapest, 2007) and is currently writing a history of the Neolog movement. Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014), and in 2011 was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania. His many publications include The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Littman Library, 2010-12), which in 2012 was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum prize of the Polish Senate for the best book on the history of Poland in a non-Polish language written in the previous five years.


Book Information
ISBN 9781906764722
Author Francois Guesnet
Format Paperback
Page Count 572
Imprint The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
Publisher Liverpool University Press