Speaker: Tamás Stark (Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, Budapest)

"Papers! Half of Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers.”- wrote Joseph Roth in his masterful work The Wandering Jews published in 1927. Roth’s statement is the motto of my presentation which tells how national elites exploited citizenship laws to create masses of „alien” Jews. An anti-Semitic wave swept across East-Central Europe at the end of the First World War. The “Jewish question” became one of the prioritized issues of the new countries. The new political elite in Hungary, in Romania and in Poland, referring to itself as national and Christian, in general did not consider Jewry as part of the “nation”. The solution national elites proposed to the “Jewish question” was, on the one hand, to oust Jews from economic and cultural life, and on the other, to expel the "aliens". For this reason state authorities were busy creating legal basis for expatriation of the “alien Jews".
On the other hand the victorious great powers forced the governments of the new East-Central European countries to sign peace treaties and minority treaties which granted citizenship for each citizen living in the territory of the given state. In my talk, I wish to explore in detail how national governments violated their international commitments and made masses of Jews stateless and vulnerable. Since Hungary is the focus of my talk, I would like to present which members of the Hungarian Jewry were considered aliens by the main actors of public life, what sort of plans were formulated to ensure their elimination, and what specific steps were taken by the successive Hungarian governments to question their citizenship and to expel them. What makes this question especially important is that in both Hungary and Romania, the “alien” Jews became the first victims of the Holocaust. In summer of 1941 they were deported to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and massacred there.
Time

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