Henrik Marczali
The Morgenstern Family, Marczali’s Socialization and Education
The forefathers of Henrik Morgenstern/Marczali (Marcali, 1856 – Budapest, 1940; Figure 1), and of his father Mihály Morgenstern/Marczali (Szalónak, 1823 – Marcali, 1889) and mother Róza Sára Freyer (Győr, 1831 – Marcali, 1906), were famous, respectable rabbis. According to the correspondence between Henrik Morgenstern/Marczali and his mother, her mother tongue was Yiddish/German, so Henrik’s parents presumably spoke German with their children,
Figure 1. Henrik Marczali, 1921 (Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. Historical Photo-Collection, 1921–1951).
The first mentor of Henrik Morgenstern/Marczali was his father, who – an advocate of Pestalozzi – allowed his seven children a wide scope of autonomous development with a lot of playing, reading and gardening. As a rabbi’s son, he did not attend elementary school, but at four he could already read and write in Hungarian. Reading was a great amusement for him. This is how he learnt German and Hebrew. Later his father helped him with Latin and French. With the employees working around the house and the neighbouring kids he spoke Hungarian, and he probably also learnt the language from them. He had a happy, free, safe childhood. In the 1890s and 1900s, when Henrik Marczali was already an accomplished historian, university professor and father of two daughters, hanging on the wall behind the desk in the study of his apartment were his father’s photo, a painting of his wife Laura Schmidl and a chalk portrait of her. In his native town, Marcali, a memorial tablet perpetuates his memory. In the statue park of the town stands his statue, erected decades earlier.
As Henrik Marczali recalled, the first book on Hungarian history he read was by Elek Peregriny, and the first world history the one by Theodor Bernhard Welter. This is how he remembered his career choice:
I was hardly over eight when I entered my father’s room and solemnly declared: I know what I will be. ‘What?’ ‘A general!’ ‘How do you want to be a general, when you’re not a count?’ This answer made me very sad. If I had no chance to perform great exploits, at least I’m going to write about them. That’s how I became a historian. (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 15)
Henrik’s younger daughter Póli presumed that her father’s attendance at the seminar led by Georg Waitz at the University of Berlin, and his researches and source explorations in libraries and manuscript collections in Berlin and Paris in the 1870s, led to his devoting himself to the study of history.
At the age of 9, Henrik sat for a private exam in the curricular material of the first two years of the nearest grammar school in Csurgó, and he studied the material of the next two years privately over the next year. At the age of ten, he started the fifth grade of the Benedictine Grammar School in Győr, where he lived with the family of his maternal aunt. From the sixth to the eight grades he studied in his father’s former alma mater, the Calvinist College of Pápa where he learnt Latin and Greek, mathematics, physics, chemistry and history.
Following the example and advice of two of his tutors at Pápa he wanted to be a teacher. Consequently, upon graduating from Pápa at the age of 14 he studied from 1870 to 1873 at Budapest University. He became increasingly interested in the subjects taught by János Hunfalvy and Árpád Kerékgyártó, geography and history. To support himself, he prepared young boys for bar mitzvah, and taught literary history as a private tutor. In the second year he won the scholarship of teacher training, and from then on lived on this grant and private teaching. After his Hungarian, Hebrew, Latin and French studies, he read Aristophanes from beginning to end to improve his knowledge of Greek. At the university, he learnt English and read the Vicar of Wakefield and Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England. In the second half of the 1890s he also learnt Turkish for his archival researches by autodidact. During his studies he read voraciously: during the day at the University Library, the library of the National Museum or the Library of the Academy, at night at home.
He passed the final exam as lecturer in early December 1873, when he was already teaching in the university’s grammar school (later called Model Grammar School). From Gusztáv Heinrich, Mór Kármán, and from his own experiences he learnt – not without pains – how to teach. He was short, with a childish face for a long time, and only grew to medium height at the age of 19–21. His first year as a teacher was hard, with lots of failures, but from the second year on he managed to keep order, and his pupils not only respected but also liked him.
His daughter Póli thought it was not before:
The subconscious fear that had beset him in the company of the worldly and sophisticated urban youths had vanished and the love of truth ignorant of boundaries burst forth from the depth of his heart that he realized that the true pedagogical work was not equal to the partial transmission of knowledge. The teaching material had to include the formation of the pupils’ characters, too. (Marczali P 1973, 58–59)
Upon the invitation of Mór Kármán, one of his outstanding tutors and also a Hungarian Jew, and Gusztáv Heinrich, Henrik wrote reviews of academic books and textbooks for their periodical Magyar Tanügy (Hungarian Education). This marked the beginning of his academic publications. However, he also contributed to daily and weekly papers, from Pester Lloyd to Egyenlőség (Equality).
At the age of 18, in 1874, when under Pál Gyulai’s influence he changed his name from Morgenstern to Marczali, he wrote his doctoral dissertation (The Influence of the Geographic Conditions upon Hungary’s History) published in Földrajzi Közlemények (Geographical Publications) and defended it in the following year.
Later, when I had also entered the guild of book writers, Pál Gyulai taught me not to be angry at being criticized and not to be thankful for being praised. The former advice I sometimes failed to abide by, the latter I observed strictly, but my silence did not increase the number of my friends. My criticism, in our narrow circle, of course, made considerable stir. Kármán mentioned them to Gyulai, who asked me to write such things for the Budapesti Szemle, I was just over 18. Gyulai Magyarized my name at that time, my father Magyarized his officially a year later. (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 61–62)
Postgraduate Studies in Berlin, Paris, London and Oxford
In 1875, at the age of 19, Henrik submitted an application for a Hungarian state scholarship to the minister of public education, Ágoston Trefort, which he won upon the recommendation of Mór Kármán. This enabled him to study for two years (1875–1877) in Berlin, Paris, London and Oxford, doing research, building professional and social contacts, and gaining decisive experience widening his horizons.
Henrik arrived in Berlin in the autumn of 1875. He attended the lectures of Theodor Mommsen, Karl Wilhelm Nitzsch, Eugen Dühring and Wilhelm Wattenbach, the seminars on source criticism by Mommsen, Nitzsch and Georg Waitz, did research in the university library, and read. He wrote seminar papers on the kings of Commagene for Mommsen and on the literary sources of Anonymus’ Gesta Hungarorum for Waitz. Waitz and his colleagues regarded the Gesta as a fictive tale, unlike Marczali, who thought it was a projection of the resettlements of the population after the Mongolian invasion to the period of the Magyars’ first settlement in the territory. Marczali arrived at this conclusion after having collated the thirteenth-century manuscript of the Latin translation of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ biography of Alexander the Great he had studied in Paris with the manuscripts of the Gesta in Munich, Berlin and Vienna. In this process he explored in detail the literary sources of the Gesta and identified them as Dares Phrygius, the Pseudo-Dares’ De Excidio Trojae Historia, Marcus Junianus Justinus’ World Chronicle, Regino Prumiensis’ World Chronicle, Isidor of Seville’s Etymologiae, C. Julius Solinus’ Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, the Latin translation of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ life of Alexander the Great and Giudo de Columna’s Historia Destructionis Troiae. Guido de Columna’s Historia led Marczali to identify Anonymus as Master Pous, the notary of King Béla IV, who wrote the Gesta after the king’s death, projecting the period of the repopulation and reconstruction of the country after the Mongol invasion to the period of the conquest of the Carpathian Basin by Magyars. Waitz praised the dissertation highly and asked his young colleague’s permission to publish it in Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, which he edited. Through his professor, Henrik also met Leopold Ranke, the doyen of German historiographers, then aged 81. Marczali visited him three times and Ranke held a lecture upon his request.
Henrik arrived in Paris in March 1876 with a recommendation of Theodor Mommsen. In the École des Chartes his tutor was Jules Quicherat, in the École des Hautes Études it was Gabriel Monod. He regularly read and did research in the Bibliothéque Nationale. The Paris salon of Monod’s wife, Olga Herzen, provided access to a network of information and potential contacts for him as it did for many others. He made the acquaintance of Ernest Renan, Hyppolite Taine, Gaston Paris and Jules Simon there, which probably also influenced his historiographic ambitions, as well as orienting him in his readings and library research. In 1877 he went to London, where he pursued research in the British Museum and, upon Waitz’s recommendation, he attended William Stubbs’ lectures on church history in Oxford.
His professional socialization in Berlin, Paris and Oxford developed Henrik Marczali’s keen source critical skills and laid the foundations for a comparative approach based on international analogies.
Venia legendi, History Seminar and Professorship
Back home, Henrik resumed what he had started doing as a student: he taught in the teacher-training grammar school of the university, first as a substitute, then as a regular teacher (1878–1886). In his dissertation for venia legendi he elaborated on the activity, historical role and influence of Jeanne d’Arc on the basis of the source editions and commentaries of his École des Chartes professor Jules Quicherat and the mediaeval source critical practice of Gabriel Monod. In retrospect, he evaluated his thematic choice in these words: the theme
was my choice… What values should a historian attribute to a miracle? In historical times there was but a single miracle: the appearance of Jeanne d’Arc. I had to get acquainted with it, to explore thoroughly its sources, to be able to testify to the essence of the miracle. The documents of the trial of the Orleans Virgin were published in four volumes by my professor Quicherat. I read them, collated them with contemporary chronicles and published letters, and arrived at a conclusion. I began elaborating it in an essay … I sent it [to the Budapesti Szemle (Budapest Review)] but Gyulai wrote he wouldn’t publish it unless I made changes, for it seemed I believed in supernatural phenomena in history. The great rationalist was right … I was most deeply preoccupied by the concept of the soul. I believed in it and constructed my basic thesis claiming that where there is control over the body, there is a soul. I then drew the most aristocratic conclusion: soul exists, but not everyone has a share of it. That was my world view at that time: the mediaeval ascetic. I was enthusiastic about anything that implied resignation… In politics, too, I respected all that had been achieved, I knew how much blood and toil were the price of meagre, lasting progress; I knew how much easier it was to destroy than to create. But that was all abstract idea: daily politics were perfectly outside my interest. (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 77–9)
With his Jeanne d’Arc essay and his university lecture entitled Influence of St Augustine and St Jerome on Mediaeval Literature he won, at the age of 22 in 1878, venia legendi: the right to hold regular lectures as an honorary lecturer (privat dozent) at Budapest University. For 17 years, from 1878 to 1895, he lectured first as an honorary lecturer, then an assistant, later on as an associate professor.
Minister Ágoston Trefort, who didn’t know Marczali was Jewish, nominated him for the rank of extraordinary university professor. Since he was not willing to convert, Marczali had to wait for nearly two decades for the appointment. In the meantime, upon Mór Kármán’s inspiration (and with support from Ferenc Salamon and Pál Gyulai) he fought for the introduction of the seminar system in the training programme of historians now raised from three to four years, and in 1886 launched the historical seminar with Ferenc Salamon as its head and László Fejérpataky and Henrik Marczali as members. The historical seminar was the institutional frame for disseminating the modern methods of source criticism. The earlier method of the students finding things out for themselves was replaced by regular methodological training in the tools of source criticism. The greatest personality was Marczali, who succeeded Salamon in 1894 in practice, and from 1895 formally as well. The director of the historical seminar was Gyula Lánczy after Salamon, followed by Remig Békefi. Marczali directed it from 1912 to 1919.
Marczali was appointed university professor by King Francis Joseph in 1895, upon presentation by the minister of religion and public education Gyula Wlassics, university professors Árpád Kerékgyártó, Loránd Eötvös, Zsolt Beöthy and Károly Than, as well as upon firm recommendation by the minister a latere Samu Jósika, president of the Austrian Imperial Academy Alfred von Arneth and Graz university professor Franz Krones. ‘In the year of the [Law of] Reception Marczali finally attained professorship’ (Grünwald Reference Grünwald1940, 138).
From the age of 39 to 68, from 1895 to 1924, Henrik Marczali was a professor of Budapest University, the first non-converted Jewish professor of history at the Catholic university founded by Péter Pázmány in Nagyszombat in 1635. His studies, source editions, books and his Budapest seminar were all guided by the comparative approach and the source critical method, for which they laid a firm foundation. He was to become the first professional Hungarian historiographer who brought up and educated professional historians as a pedagogue.
The oeuvre
Henrik Marczali was a historiographer and scholarly teacher of extraordinary achievement. He published three great monographs (in six volumes) based on primary research and source criticism, wrote several syntheses, edited two, wrote four out of the nine volumes of Világtörténet (World History) and six out of twelve of Nagy képes világtörténet (Illustrated Great World History). Between 1874 and 1936 he published innumerable scholarly papers, articles, studies and sources, newspaper articles, lectures and pamphlets. One book of his appeared in Cambridge, two in Tübingen. He published and lectured in Hungarian, German, French and English. His writings add up to around ten thousand pages. The quality, source exploration, source critical, analytical and interpretive as well as comparative approach, and the interdisciplinary character of his research methods were certainly pioneering in Hungary. He personally interviewed famous contemporary politicians. With this he introduced a new genre and source type, nowadays called oral history.
On the basis of extensive source research and rigorous source criticism he wrote on Hungarian history and presented and interpreted the universal history of modern and recent times on the basis of a very wide spectrum of primary sources and literature. In three monographs and in his syntheses he concluded that the period after the Turkish occupation was a time of repopulation, consolidation and reconstruction. His explorations and interpretations did not idealize in black-and-white tones but duly differentiated. He made fair and, in the cases of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, appreciative judgements of the positive developments during their reigns but did not spare their persons or policies his criticism either. He described the colonizing effect of the dual tariff system (his term), both the humane and narrow-minded features of ‘enlightened absolutism’, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the politics of the Hungarian estates, the economic, social, political and cultural conditions of Hungary, and the late eighteenth-century political resistance of the Hungarian nobility. In the regional and broader perspective, the first book of Macaulay’s, The History of England: From the Accession of James the Second, served as his model.
Marczali opined that the task of the historiographer was to treat his subject objectively, without prejudice, sine ira et studio, by exploring all data available with the source critical method. The audience he wrote for included the practitioners of the discipline at home and abroad, and the wider erudite public. He believed that to uncover a scientific truth the preconditions include lack of bias, independence and courage, and that the person who exercises these qualities sets an example of moral behaviour. This is not a gift and cannot be achieved in full, but it must be the ideal goal, and he claimed he had always tried to be unprejudiced and objective. He regarded himself as an erudite, hard-working scholar, a Hungarian patriot who was proud of his Jewish origin, and who could provide his readers and listeners with conclusions to ponder. All the notable historians who graduated from Budapest were students of his. On his 80th birthday he was celebrated by his former students. Fülöp Grünwald described him in the Jewish yearbook Ararát, among the Jewish practitioners of Hungarian historiography, as a representative of ‘the type of professionally trained German professors’, the ‘creator of the epoch-making oeuvre’ of his age.
Daily Life
For nearly five decades the venue of Henrik Marczali’s daily life in Budapest was his apartment at 59–61 József körút. At that time, the circular road, József körút, was wide, with lots of trees and hardly any traffic. He went from there to his workplace, the faculty of humanities, his room, the university auditoria, the historical seminar, to libraries, manuscript collections and archives.
Póli Marczali’s memoirs reveal that her father was a workaholic. He dressed casually, insisted on long-worn pieces of clothes, sometimes breached the social customs (out of absent-mindedness or passionately governed by his sense of justice), he often treated his daughters, particularly Póli, too strictly, and he occasionally lost his temper. Still, his daughter remembered him, the world around him, and her youth with high esteem and respect. Her memoirs are an important supplement to her father’s recollections.
Henrik Marczali’s wife Laura Schmidl (Budapest, 1866–1920), whom Marczali married on 20 December 1883 (when Laura was 17, he 27) was an elder sister of Miklós Schmidl, a pupil of Marczali in the model grammar school. She spoke five languages, played the piano very well and was radiantly beautiful – she was the heart and soul of the salon kept regularly for decades in their home. Gabriel Monod’s wife Olga Alexandrovna Herzen’s salon in Paris and Ferenc Pulszky’s in Budapest served as inspirations and examples. Their two daughters, Bözse and Póli – Mrs Frigyes May born Erzsébet Marczali (Budapest, 1885–1937) writer and translator, and Mrs Sándor Gál, later Mrs Ottó Ernst born Paula (Póli) Marczali (Budapest, 1889 – Great Britain, after 1973) philanthropist, helper – were intellectuals committed to making the world a better, more humane and righteous place.
Erzsébet Marczali married Frigyes May, a convert to Catholicism, in 1910, in the Sacred Heart of Jesus church; they were wedded by the superior of the Cistercian order. Their two children – Henrik Marczali’s two grandchildren, István János May and Mrs Pál Szarvas born Erzsébet May, were Catholic. In Laura Schmidl’s death certificate, the rubric religion says ‘Roman Catholic’. If this item is not a slip of the pen – and it probably isn’t – then she must have converted, too.
It is known from Póli Marczali’s memoirs that after his wife’s death in 1920 and his ousting from the university in 1924, Henrik Marczali could no longer afford the large apartment with the employees. By courtesy of Mrs Pál Festetics, born Fanny Pálffy, he lived in the Pálffy palace in Esterházy Street, and then moved to 16, Arany János Street, to the third floor, for a far lower rent.
Marczali stayed in contact with his relatives and the Jewish community in Marcali throughout his life. In his old age, he regularly visited the grandchildren of his elder sister – Mrs Miksa Berger, born Johanna Marczali – as a substitute granddad. He may have been missing his own Catholic grandchildren who were almost forbidden to see their Jewish grandfather. He contrasted the aristocratic, representative character of social life to the middle-class life of everyday industriousness. ‘Those were the holidays. For me, the weekdays were precious. I had and have a single sentence, Heyse’s poem: “Wohl, Ruhm und Macht / Und Gold und Pracht. / Sind Sterne dieser Erdennacht; / Des Lebens Tagsgestirne sind: / Arbeit und Weib und Kind”’ (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 268). He underlined this with a recollection:
We were sitting three of us together: Kálmán Mikszáth and Ödön Gajáry and me. They find an excuse for me: it’s my job to be in contact with them [the aristocrats], because of their archives. Mikszáth: still, they are the ones who have good manners. Gajáry: they owe us far more than we owe them. Count Sándor Apponyi was the first to honour me. I saw to an appropriate company. The next day, Imre Hodossy: I’ve spent all my life with lords. But I didn’t know they also included such a person. Some weeks later we were together at a great soirée. He asked how I liked it. I replied with a Goethe poem: ‘Aus einer grossen Gesellschaft heraus / Ging einst ein stiller Gelehrter nach haus. / Wie sind Sie, fragt man, zufrieden gewesen? / Wären’s Bücher, ich würde sie nicht lesen’. (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 268–269. Goethe, Gesellschaft)
The Marczali affair
On 22 January 1910, ‘Dénes Görcsöni’ (pen name of István Friedrich) accused Henrik Marczali of fraud in an editorial on the front page of Alkotmány (Constitution). The Jewish professor was charged with misuse of power for having told his Jewish doctoral student Artúr Singer the examination question beforehand. The accused immediately requested a disciplinary procedure against himself. He endured the press accusations and tumultuous scenes at the university with resolve and dignity and responded to the charges with an action for libel. All legal fora and quality papers testified to his innocence. The affair was terminated by a letter, dated 1 June 1910, of the minister of religion and public education, János Zichy, to the university council. However, the series of scandals launched in Alkotmány by István Friedrich, Marczali’s former frustrated student turned journalist, and fuelled by the Catholic People’s Party politicians, incensed a lot of people, first of all the St Emeric college students, the university’s movement of the cross. That the whole had been based on a lie and that the accused was innocent was officially confirmed when, on 30 October 1913, the royal court passed the judgment that Henrik Marczali had been calumniated.
The whole hullabaloo was to prevent me from being elected dean … The wretched ones! I would never have accepted the post. I am for teaching, not for administration. [Gyula] Sághy [1844–1916, lawyer, professor, opposition politician, rector of the university in 1909/10] and the rest knew full well I was not a fraud, just like anyone else – but that’s politics! (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 191)
His students expressed their solidarity with their professor, presenting him with a silver plaque with a laurel wreath, which Marczali kept on his desk. The plaque featured a quotation from the Aeneid: ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’ (‘and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day’). Below it the date and signature said: ‘1910. Henrik Marczali’s students’ (Marczali P 1973, 191. Vergilius, Aeneis I, 203).
In 1910, József Schönfeld in the Zionist monthly Zsidó Szemle critiqued Marczali for his daughter Erzsébet Marczali’s conversion to Catholicism and Henrik Marczali himself for keeping aloof of Zionism.
Being Hungarian, Being a Jew, Being a Hungarian Jew
From 1912 to 1919 Henrik Marczali was the director of the Historical Seminar of Budapest University’s Faculty of Humanities. During the First World War he engaged in extensive propaganda activity on the side of the Monarchy. In 1920 he wrote a pamphlet about the injustice of the Trianon Peace Treaty: he enumerated the western features of the evolution of the Hungarian nation one by one to justify the existence and integrity of historical Hungary. At the time he was on forced leave as, of the autumn of the previous year, his right to lecture at the university had been suspended following his protest at an army officers’ attempt to exert influence in the university. He was set aside in spite of the fact that first the Academy’s and the university’s political screening committees and later minister József Vass had concluded that he had not committed any unpatriotic, anti-national act in 1918–1919. On the initiative of the faculty council, the next minister, Kuno Klebelsberg, in 1924, sent Marczali into retirement at the age of 68, with the consent of the head of state Miklós Horthy. For Fülöp Grünwald, ‘The Catholic People’s Party launched the persecution of Marczali. What they failed to achieve in 1910, they obtained a decade later, in the days of the post-war establishment [of the newly-independent Hungary]. They removed Marczali from the university’ (Grünwald Reference Grünwald1940, 138).
After he was pensioned off and ousted from the Hungarian scientific institutions, Marczali still published several studies in Budapesti Szemle and Századok, and wrote articles and statements for Pesti Hírlap, Pesti Napló, Esti Kurír, Az Est, Világ, Újság, 8 Órai Újság, Budapesti Hírlap and Pester Lloyd. In 1929 he published his recollections with the title Emlékeim [My Memories] in Nyugat.
In his recollections, Marczali wrote the following about his father:
As much as he was a believing, good Jew, he hated, even abhorred superficial, soulless religiosity wallowing in formulae, rites, the narrow-minded adherence to the letter, as the killer of morality and culture. He would brand that attitude as the deceiving of God. He opined that the men of old had to define all sorts of constraints to curb the superstitious masses, but good-hearted, cultured and enlightened people were no longer in need of them … But he demanded the honouring of the Sabbath … Anyone who had some trouble or concern could turn to him, knowing he could not get better and more unselfish advice anywhere else … (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 26).
In a paper he presented a year later about the history of the Jews in Hungary he also differentiated between Jews sunken into mediaeval superstition and fanaticism and Jews that had joined European culture. As a child he had been very religious, and although he didn’t have to get involved in the rituals, the family was strict about observing Sabbath. In his last grammar school year, however, he no longer attended religion instruction: ‘I got fed up with sanctimony’ (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 46).
Marczali’s choice of scholarly themes was also determined by his identity as a Jew. He turned down the offer to elaborate on an important subject out of conscious self-constraint. On 24 November 1878, (politicians) Dezső Szilágyi and Ákos Pulszky asked him to write
a book to verify that the church lands had originally been and remained state property. I was surprised and liked the idea at first very much … But a moment later I remembered Széchenyi’s saying: Jews shouldn’t deal with the question of ecclesiastic property. I didn’t say that but merely remarked that I was honoured by their commission, the thesis could be proven scientifically, but I would not write that book. Someone else should. (Marczali Reference Marczali2000, 113)
For Marczali, the most beautiful Jewish prayer was The Lord’s Prayer. Yet, Póli Marczali reminisced in 1973 about her father, recalling her sister’s and her own young life: ‘… my father… took the liberty to forbid us to learn Hebrew in the Judaic religion class… despite the compulsory curriculum’ (Marczali P Reference Marczali1973, 34). At the same time, though, he severely condemned conversion to Christianity within the family.
When, in 1905, Marczali held a lecture on national development, he defined the direction of progress in individual and national improvement as the norm of the individual, the nation and mankind. He closed his train of thoughts with a quotation from the Tanach: ‘For we are a small nation, but the prophet has written: if my people is righteous, the least of you will become a thousand, the smallest a mighty nation’ (Marczali Reference Marczali1905, 110; Isaiah 60: 21–22, King James Version).
On that same Tanach he had already written in 1898 as follows:
Historical criticism has dissected and dissembled into constituents the book each letter of which is respected by most people as sacred truth: the Bible. But what is truly historical in it, the inspiration of the prophetic soul, the establishment of monotheism on earth, remains true and firm like a rock. (Marczali Reference Marczali1898)
From 1918 on he was involved in the public life of the Hungarian Neolog Jews, and from the 1920s he was one of the leading spiritual authorities of the Pest Israelite Community, board member of the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society, chairman of the Society’s Archival committee and delegate of the Society to the Hungarian Jewish Museum Association. About the history of the Jews in Szeged a lot of card material survives in the Manuscript Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Several writings by him as well as interviews appeared in Egyenlőség.
In his monograph on Joseph II and his era, Henrik Marczali discussed the situation of the Jews in Hungary separately, a discussion he also published in the Magyar Zsidó Szemle. He explained the theme in connection with Joseph II’s edict and the debates of the diet of 1790/91, regarding the elimination of subjugation as a basic human requirement. On 30 April 1930, he held a lecture in the Jewish Literary Society, IMIT, about the history of the Jews in Hungary entitled The Land is the Man, and on 29 March 1933 another on the Szeged emancipatory act dated 29 July 1849. The lectures were published in the yearbooks of the society. In the 1930 lecture (Marczali Reference Marczali1930) he reviewed the history of the Hungarian Jewry up to the second half of the nineteenth century from the angle of the Jews’ right to possess land. Based on his source researches in Hungarian and universal history, his source explorations and elaborations, he touched on the constraints and possibilities of the situation and the antecedents of the emancipation of the Jews in Hungary.
Henrik Marczali is among those who could remould the attitude of maskil Jews (autodidact Hebrew scholars inspired by Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment) into a secular professional intellectual role. He was a Hungarian patriot, who affirmed his Jewish origins. He believed in intellectual and moral education. He became a professional intellectual, a paragon of spiritual and moral behaviour. Simon Dubnov wrote the World History of the Jewish People, the first secular and scholarly synthesis of the entire Jewish history. Henrik Marczali wrote professional Hungarian and world history, but within this he had an eye for the history of the Jewry. ‘Patriotism and monotheism’ was his motto (Marczali Reference Marczali1927, 7). In 1936, on his 80th birthday, he raised his voice against anti-Semitism as well as the Jews’ cowardice and lapse from faith: ‘The obligation of the Jews is to preserve the fire for ever and ever: the fire of reason and faith… The existence, the mainstay, the trunk of the Jewry is strong. It is senseless for the leaves to fall off tired, dying’ (Marczali Reference Marczali1936, 11).
Grünwald summed up his former professor’s attachment to Jewishness as follows:
Marczali, with whom the line of generations of rabbis was interrupted, used Berzsenyi’s Fohászkodás [prayer] as his prayer already in his childhood in the Somogy county village the name of which he adopted for his surname. As a young teacher, he did not yield to his patronizing teachers’ campaign to convert him, though they tried to persuade him to leave his faith with the promise of a professorship … Yet for decades he was not in contact with the cultural efforts of the Jewry. A paper or two appeared in the Magyar-Zsidó Szemle in 1884/85, none to follow before the article in the Literary Society Yearbook in 1910. After Acsády’s death, he took the chair of the Archival committee. He assumed more roles in Jewish public life after 1920. (Grünwald Reference Grünwald1940, 138–139)
In 1931, at the age of 75, Marczali’s name occurs in the list of supplementary candidates of the United Liberal and Democratic Opposition in the Parliamentary Almanac. As a spiritual and moral authority of the Pest Israelite Community, he set an example of value judgement and behaviour for the collective. His book, Erdély története (A History of Transylvania) is still on the wanted list in second-hand bookstores. On his 80th birthday, when his former students came to greet him in his home, the journalist of Egyenlőség had an interview with him.
From his retirement – despite his ministerial allowance – Marczali had financial problems. Although in 1930 he was still living in the large apartment in József körút with servants, he soon had to move as he could no longer afford it. His daughter Póli remembered that in his last years her father was gravely ill, but he had inner peace. He died of old age and prostate problems in the Jewish charity hospital. He was buried two days later in the Kozma street Jewish cemetery (5B-10-1). Henrik Marczali’s parents, Mihály Marczali and Róza Sára Freyer rest in the ancient Jewish cemetery of Marcali. The shortened formula referring to learned but not rabbi Jews before the Hebrew name of Henrik Marczali on his gravestone is no mere formality. He was a great teacher, מרנו הרב morenu harav.
György Szabad
The Schwartz, Steiner, Blancz / Blantz Family
The father of György Schwartz/Szabad (Arad, 1924 – Budapest, 2015; Figure 2) was the leather merchant Imre Schwartz (Elek, 1892 – Budapest, 1941), his mother was Erzsébet Blantz (Elek, 1898 – Budapest, 1988). His sister, Éva Szathmáry (Arad, 1922 – Budapest, 2004), was a doctor. György Schwartz/Szabad’s maternal grandfather and grandmother, Mór Blantz and Hermina Steiner (and after her early death Róza Spitzer), lived in Elek. The grandfather was a village ironmonger. The grandmother’s reading notes included works by Friedrich Schiller, József Eötvös, Imre Madách and Jean Paul. The ancestors of the Blantz family were French Jews (Blanc), who probably left France after the Revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes (1598). Their descendants cropped up in Orosháza, then in Hódmezővásárhely where they became related in marriage to the Steiners, a family of Jewish burghers and intellectuals. Mór Blantz spoke German and French, could play the piano, and the interior of his house echoed the decorative culture of the lesser and middle nobility. His books reflected the tastes of the period with nineteenth-century classics, also Károly Eötvös, liberal newspapers and weeklies.
He was characterized by an intellectual curiosity that was passed on to his children, including my mother. They lived in modest circumstances, but they hungered for culture, possibly regarded as the means of social rise or return… the periodical Nyugat appeared on the village shelves, too. (Szabad Reference Szabad2017, 21–29)
Figure 2. Zsuzsa G. Fábri: György Szabad. Budapest, 1986 (owned by the Szabad family).
Double Minority
György Schwartz attended the first two years of elementary school in Arad, Marosvásárhely (Tirgu Mures) and Kolozsvár (Klausenburg, Cluj, now Cluj-Napoca). Officially the school was bilingual but in Marosvásárhely and Kolozsvár the Romanian language was predominant, so the mother taught her two children from schoolbooks smuggled in from Hungary. The Schwartz family subscribed to liberal journals.
… my father kept his Hungarian citizenship after Trianon, too. He had the legal possibility by having been born on that side of the border. Thus, he could decide whether to adopt Romanian citizenship, which was only compulsory for those who had been born on the Romanian side of the new border. He kept the Hungarian nationality, and it caused quite some conflicts. We were regarded as foreign citizens and had to have our residence permit extended at the Siguranţa, the Romanian police, regularly. The occasional conflicts culminated in a very serious one. My father, who had won the director’s post of the Meggyesfalva leather factory as an expert, fell victim to a terrorist attack during a journey to Bucharest. His train was stopped on the open track by the Iron Guard and the passengers’ papers were demanded. My father identified himself with a Hungarian passport, but it also revealed that he was not only Hungarian but also a Jew – double delight for the Iron Guard members. They beat him so heavily with iron rods that when they threw him off the train, they thought he was dead. (Szabad Reference Szabad2017, 19–20)
Upon the initiative of Erzsébet Blantz, the family in 1932 resettled in Hungary. In 1941, when the third anti-Jewish law was passed, Imre Schwartz committed suicide. György Schwartz was 17 years old.
In Danger of Death
György Schwartz was attracted to history, sociology and political science. Along with books on the life of the peasantry, he read José Ortega y Gasset, Wilhelm Röpke and Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi. He graduated from the Berzsenyi Dániel Grammar School in 1942. As he was not permitted to attend university, he became a gardening apprentice at the Hungarian Jewish Handicraft and Agricultural Association on Keresztúri Road in Budapest’s Kőbánya district. After the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, György Schwartz was enlisted for forced labour. On 15 October 1944 he escaped from the company and hid in the home of Margit Kozlik (1909–1957), the widow of his murdered maternal uncle. After the liberation of Hungary he was seized by the Russians – but managed to escape again.
Marriage and Name Change
In 1945 György Schwartz married Judit Szegő (1923 – Budapest, 2003) a survivor of the Shoa. He changed his name from György Schwartz to György Szabad. For a few years he cultivated the soil on his wife’s farm, while he pursued university studies in Budapest. They lived in a rented flat in Szemere Street in the 1950s and in a small apartment in Rippl-Rónai Street in the 1960s–1970s. György’s choice of the name Szabad was conscious and meant a programme for life: it means ‘free.’ But how free could György Szabad be, as someone who lived through decisive traumas as a child and adolescent, lived under a dictatorship as an adult, felt solidarity with the victims and was in opposition to the perpetrators? What roles could he choose from, and what role did he choose? How was his selected role related to his selected name, his life’s programme? It was the role of the rescuer of the traumatized. I review the nodes of his career trying to answer these questions.
University 1
György Szabad pursued academic studies – in addition to farming (until he and his wife were forced to hand over their land to the state) – between 1945 and 1949 at the Pázmány Péter University, and from 1949 to 1950 in its legal successor, the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences. Initially a student of humanities in general, attending the lectures of Sándor Domanovszky, István Hajnal and Domokos Kosáry, when, in 1948/49, he had to specialize he opted for history, librarianship and sociology. In 1949 he attended a preliminary course in archiving and, in addition to history, also studied archival research. His teachers included Imre Szentpétery, Iván Borsa, István Sinkovics and Emma Lederer. He graduated in 1950. His dissertation was entitled Our Agrarian Poverty and the Demand for Hungarian Agricultural Labour in 1849–1867. He had no supervisor, only an opponent. When he finished university, he had already been a trainee at the Hungarian National Archives. From 1951 to 1954 he was an assistant teacher at ELTE, from 1954 a junior lecturer, from 1956 a senior lecturer. His wife Judit Szegő worked in the National Széchényi Library. In adulthood he learnt a lot from archivist Oszkár Paulinyi, and from Professor István Szabó, though he was not his student. He entertained good professional relationships with historians János Varga, Ágnes R. Várkonyi and Károly Vörös. The poet and literary historian György Rába was a close friend.
The First Monograph
When György Szabad was writing his CSc (Candidate of Academy of Sciences) thesis, defended in 1955, the totalitarian one-party state expected academicians to follow the ideological Stalinist social formations scheme of the five forms (primitive, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist, communist society), the class struggle, the revolution and revolutionary violence. Szabad’s first monograph, The Switching from Corvée to Capitalist Management on the Tata and Gesztes Estates of the Esterházy Family (1957) continued and superseded the estate histories of the Domanovszky school, instead of illustrating the tenet of original capital accumulation. His students – as Károly Kecskeméti recalled – elaborated histories of large estates in their diploma dissertations.
1956
György Szabad was never a member of the Communist Party. He was a demanding and popular lecturer. The Kolkhoz Circle, organized by József Molnár and which numbered some 40–50 members, held an illegal meeting on the eve of the day of the 1848 revolution, 15 March 1956. Szabad was an invited guest. After this, Zoltán I. Tóth (1911–1956, historian, dean of the Faculty of History, another invited guest of the Circle) and Szabad regularly met for lunch or conversations. Szabad attended the meetings of the Petőfi Circle, the intellectual opposition forum, the re-burial of some victims of Stalinist purges at Kerepesi cemetery on 6 October, and the solidarity demonstration for the Poznan uprising and for a democratic, free and independent Hungary in Budapest, the first great event of the revolution of 1956 on 23 October. In the days of the revolution he was elected a member of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Teachers, and after 4 November, the very first day of the second Russian intervention, as the secretary of the Revolutionary Students’ Committee of the University. During the Kádárian restoration, ‘in the years of vicissitudes’, he was under surveillance, and under constant political pressure from András Siklós, the head of the Modern Hungarian History department and Szabad’s boss at that time, and other party-member lecturers. He had his lectures taken down in shorthand. The dean István Kniezsa defended him, Dezső Pais lent moral support.
University 2
Szabad’s university lectures highlighted Hungarian history between 1790 and 1890. His classes, seminars and archival workshops addressed thematic questions as well as case studies, as did the diploma and doctoral dissertations he supervised. His lectures were very popular, presenting the students with professional, moral, lecturing and behavioural models. The aim of his seminars was to help the students acquire the attitudes, skills and techniques of research work in history via individual problem solving, collective debate, group dynamism and person-centred attention. For those he found interested and talented, he recommended dissertation themes. During his weekly office hours anyone could drop by and he would help them to elaborate their themes independently. He wrote (thorough, painstaking, objective and critical) evaluations of diploma and doctoral dissertations, examining them from the aspects of source and literature use to content, structure and style, giving one copy to the dean’s office and one to the candidate. He was never the head of a department, never held a position of power as a teacher, never disposed of financial resources or status. What he offered was knowledge, discipline, and an intellectual and moral example.
György Szabad wrote several studies, two pathbreaking monographs, a small monograph, a book on the border area of source presentation and elaboration, and on that basis two samplers, for the section of 1849–1890 in the two-volume History of Hungary (1964). He is the author of the part on neo-absolutism in the university textbook (1972) and the ten-volume History of Hungary (1979).
The Ideological Context
After 1956, the ideologues of the one-party state changed the canon of the Marxist-Leninist interpretative frame. Erik Molnár (1894–1966, lawyer, ideologue, communist politician), in the wake of Ervin Szabó (1877–1918, sociologist, Marxist theoretician), overruled its syllogism (explored by the historian Jenő Szűcs, 1928–1988): people = progressive, people = national, hence: national = progressive, and József Révai’s (1898–1959, communist chief ideologue during the Stalinist period) thesis about the modernizing function of the double-souled middle stratum of the nobility. Molnár’s premise was progressive = hence non-national, on which basis he qualified Habsburg absolutism and empire as progressive, the Hungarian nobility as feudal, and the freedom fights of the Hungarian estates as separatist and reactionary. The polemic that evolved around Erik Molnár and his views did away with several taboos and opened the road to researches less beset by compulsory schemes. However, with his rigidly anti-nationalist approach to history – which he reformulated and raised to the canon of the historical sciences of the Kádár regime in opposition to the legacy of the revolution of 1956 (after the nomenclature change and anti-nationalist campaign in the Soviet Baltic republics) – Molnár created new taboos. These included national self-determination, nation building, and national independence, considered not as values in themselves but as instruments, and most frequently as obstacles to or shackles of social progress.
Debate of the Academic Doctoral Dissertation
György Szabad completed his great monograph Forradalom és kiegyezés válaszútján 1860–61 (At the Crossroads between Revolution and Compromise (1860–61)) in 1964. The book was published in 1967, and the author defended it as his academic doctoral dissertation in 1969. The monograph developed an argumentation independent of Révai’s and Molnár’s interpretations and ended with a citation from Lucan often used in the age of neo-absolutism – ‘Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni’ (Lucanus: Pharsalia 1: 128 (the victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato)). This was a direct reference to the opponents of the Ausgleich (the Compromise with Austria) in 1867 and indirectly to 1956. Szabad’s doctoral dissertation as it were burst the frame of the one-party state. The book polemicizes (between the lines) with Gyula Szekfű’s (1883–1955, historian, ideologue, diplomat, politician) anti-liberal history of decline, with the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist schematism, and with the pro-Compromise historiography of the 1960s reduced to a dogmatic and pragmatic viewpoint. Instead of the exclusiveness of determinism, the projection into the past of the tenet it happened, so it had to happen, Szabad perceived and presented the diversity of the conflicts and dilemmas of the actors of history.
The debate during the doctoral defence was also unusual. The opponents, István Sőtér, Endre Kovács and Domokos Kosáry, esteemed the work highly and unanimously recommended that the author be awarded the academic doctoral degree by the Scientific Qualifying Committee. However, during the debate Lajos Lukács presented an hours-long commentary equal to an obstruction, which stymied the process for a long time. The next day Szabad’s old enemy András Siklós, his boss at the university department after 1956, declared that the author and his work were not Marxist. This would preclude his qualification. Szabad did not reply and elegantly left it to the committee to evaluate his scholarly achievement. However, he responded to all the professional arguments and counterarguments objectively. In the two-day debate several opinions and arguments were heard. At the end, the delegated committee did recommend the author and his work for the academic doctoral title.
Polemics
During the 1960s and 1970s, the debates between György Szabad on the one hand and Lajos Lukács, Péter Hanák and Domokos Kosáry on the other continued. Lajos Lukács brought Szabad to book for failing to apply the exclusive and infallible scheme imposed by Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. Without arguing with Szabad he stigmatized him. His arguments and theses did not stand the test of professional criticism. In his comments on Szabad’s monograph and their polemics, Péter Hanák (1927–1997, historian) displayed great flexibility. Domokos Kosáry (1913–2007, historian, politician), during Szabad’s thesis defence and later, argued that the retrograde political role of the nobility determined the character of Hungarian politics and made the Ausgleich possible. Adjusting to the ideology of the Hungarian one-party state led by János Kádár, Kosáry, from the early 1970s on, modernized and spun out the branding evaluation of Szabad by András Siklós and Lajos Lukács. He condemned anyone who did not share his stance as a romantic nationalist, national communist or dogmatic Marxist.
Contribution to a Debate of the Canons of Historiography
In the succession of the Hungarian one-party state historical canons Révai’s interpretation was replaced by that of Erik Molnár in the 1960s, and Molnár’s by István Király’s in 1973. István Király rehabilitated Révai and the national tradition by revaluing the tradition of the nobility’s fight for independence and devaluing the Habsburg imperial legacy. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, governed by party apparatchiks, staged a debate in Vácrátót about Király’s critique of Erik Molnár. György Szabad was also invited and contributed to the dispute. While the great majority of the participants took Erik Molnár’s side, and a small minority spoke for Király and indirectly for Révai, Szabad’s contribution abounded in arguments independent of the two canons. He concluded that Révai and Erik Molnár, their importance in the historical debate having been duly acknowledged, must finally be superseded. Schematism, he claimed, should not be pitted against counter-schematism, but against anti-schematism, and the ‘rotation of illusions’ should be left behind through professional expert approaches.
On the Responsibility and Role of the Historian
In 1974, Szabad wrote an introductory essay entitled Responsibility of the Historian to a thematic issue of Tiszatáj containing Writings of Young Historians. Taking stock of the professional and moral responsibilities of the historian, he also pointed out the responsibility to the dead. At several places he expressed his conviction that the exercise of the historians’ profession and the popularization of their views on history shape collective memory, which has come to take the relief of transcendent ideals in the public mind. Acting against the fear of complete annihilation and the decline of individual responsibility, this collective memory accounts for the survival of the people’s memory and ensures that their good or bad deeds shall not and cannot lapse. Apparently, this concept of the role of the historian and his mission was also a form of self-definition, the two being tightly interrelated. In Szabad’s view, the historian is responsible to the living, and responsible to the dead.
The Connotations of the ‘Hungarian Jew’ and its Thematic Halo
György Szabad was not religious, he was very likely pantheistic. He claimed he was Hungarian by identity and Jewish by origin, the descendant of Hungarian citizens and intellectuals of the Judaic faith, and this he made a point of mentioning whenever he could do so in public, e.g. in his university lectures in the 1960s–1970s. He probably thought of the Jewry as a complex historical formation implying common customs, traditions, historical endowments and potentialities. For some people the cultural aspects and for others the religious aspects were important. This amounted to a re-interpreted revival of the Haskalah maskil interpretation of secular intellectual knowledge and its role.
In Szabad’s view, the anti-Jewish laws and the genocide were fatally bad not only for the victims but also for Hungarian democratic development. In his seminal monograph (1967) he adopted the term self-mutilation used by the Resolution Party in the 1860s for outvoting themselves, and applied it to the deprivation and segregation of people branded as Jews, as national self-mutilation. He also searched nineteenth-century history to find possibilities that could have prevented or warded off the twentieth-century dictatorships and their inhuman consequences, so that subsequent generations could simply and self-evidently – not programmatically – be free. His entire behaviour, physical and mental attitude and his activity and public role were attempts to prove that the anti-Semites are wrong and that Jews – like any other group of people – could be good humans and good Hungarians. Since the Jews (in his opinion) constituted not a nationality or a people but rather a religious denomination and culture in the Hungary of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with ongoing secularization and democratic progress they would, in the long run, dissolve. He sympathized with Israel and opposed anti-Semitism as a person, teacher and democrat. He shared the Neolog Jews’ inimical image of the Orthodox Jews. He considered the Orthodox rabbis, and even more the Hasidic rebbes, to be potential ayatollahs and described the one-time Orthodox Jewish communities in north-eastern Hungary as backward.
He dedicated his first book (1957) to the memory of his murdered maternal uncles. He discussed in detail, objectively, the history of the Jews in Hungary in his great 1967 monograph, his syntheses and lectures. He wrote a study of the Tiszaeszlár trial of ritual murder and the related anti-Semitic riots. It was he who called attention to István Bibó’s essay The Jewish Question in Hungary after 1944, in 1969, and who recommended the study of Hungarian Jewish politician Vilmos Vázsonyi’s political role as a dissertation theme. He sympathized with the United Liberal and Democratic Opposition, the supplementary list of candidates of which also had included Henrik Marczali, whose oeuvre Szabad held in high esteem. He made references to Rusztem Vámbéry, Károly Rassay and Rezső Rupert as positive examples. He mentioned the periodicals Századunk (Our Century) and Toll (Pen) in a similar tone, too. In a conversation he recalled Ede Ormos with great respect. In the Bibó conference in 1992 he said the final words. He took part in the reburial of Oszkár Jászi. He thought highly of the political role of János Vázsonyi and the oeuvre and personality of Jewish scholar Sándor Scheiber. In his memoirs he recalled his Hungarian Jewish ancestors in detail. He was convinced that a historian should not judge family background as positive or negative, but simply as a circumstance to be taken into account. He advocated social organization and selection based on achievement instead of birth. All his teaching, scholarly and political activities were directed again despotism and systems of privileges. Toward the end of his life, I think, his political gestures were driven by a desire for a non-anti-Semitic political conservatism and to protect his wife and daughter – after his divorce from Judit Szegő he had married Andrea Suján (Budapest, 1964) in 1982 and a daughter (Júlia Anna) had been born in 1984 – from anti-Semitism. He cannot have foreseen what took place since 2010: the devaluation of the constitutional state into a mere stage set, the abolition of the independence of autonomous institutions, the erosion of the separation of powers and their replacement with traditional and modern forms of power concentration, the gradual institution of autocracy and tyranny.
At the back of György Szabad’s self-definition, role concept and interpretation of collective memory there are grave and deep-lying traumas, to combat which, György Schwartz assumed the programmatic name György Szabad [Free], and from the traumatized role patterns of victim, rescuer and perpetrator he chose that of the rescuer. With his example as teacher and scholar he refuted the anti-Semitic image of the Jew and authenticated the change into a Hungarian democrat, a process he wished to promote directly with his public activity and role so that nobody would have to face the dilemmas of humanist or patriot, progress or nation, modernity or identity/belonging somewhere.
György Szabad taught at ELTE University from 1953 to 1990, as professor from 1970. In 1990 he was the first freely elected speaker of the parliament, MP from 1994 to 1998. He died at Honvéd Hospital on 3 July 2015, at the age of 91. He received a state funeral. Four years later his gravestone was erected in parcel 28 of the Fiumei Road Cemetery. His parents, sister and first wife are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kozma Street.
Conclusion
Both Henrik Marczali and György Szabad were school-founding Hungarian Jewish scholars and teachers with a strong Hungarian identity and loyalty and of national liberal conviction. Both were professional historians who aimed at objectivity, and who openly and proudly professed their Jewish background. They conceived of the historical development of humankind as a civilizing process from nomadism and personal rule to a sedentary urban way of life and the modern constitutional nation state. Both explored a wide range of materials and studied them via detailed source criticism. With their works, pedagogical activity, and public roles and behaviour, they set individual and collective patterns of value judgement and behaviour, and were an example for students, disciples and readers.
Henrik Marczali was the first professional historian in Hungary who produced an exceptional oeuvre. His pre-First World War achievements and example for many people exemplified the successful assimilation of the Jews in Hungary. However, between the ages of 64 and 68 he suffered irremediable losses. He was still alive when the first two anti-Jewish laws were passed, but he did not live to see the complete deprivation, helplessness, and victimization of the Shoa. György Szabad was brought up and lived his creative period under a dictatorship. He chose a name and role that agitated against traumas and dictatorships, against the perpetrators, on the side of the victims. His chosen name was not accidental, but a consciously assumed life programme. His role was not that of the victim or the perpetrator, but of the rescuer. He performed this role to the benefit of many of us during his pursuits as professor and researcher.
About the Author
Iván Zoltán Dénes is a historian of ideas who over the last decade or so has concentrated on research on historical traumas and trauma management. He is the author of 12 books (including eight monographs) and editor of 48 volumes. He served as researcher (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy, 1973–1997), professor and chair (Debrecen University, 1997–2011), and was founding president of the István Bibó Center for Advanced Studies of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Budapest, 1996–2012). Currently he is the principal investigator of the Henrik Marczali Research Team, Budapest. He has been awarded visiting professorships and scholarships at, among others, the British Academy (London, Oxford, Cambridge), the Fulbright Commission (Stanford), IREX (Johns Hopkins, Harvard), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Wassenaar), and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books in English include The Art of Peacemaking. Political Essays by István Bibó (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015); Conservative Ideology in the Making (Budapest & New York: CEU Press, 2009); Liberty and the Search for Identity. Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires (Budapest & New York: CEU Press, 2006). He is a member of the Academia Europaea (1995–). A full list of publications can be found at https://m2.mtmt.hu/gui2/?type=authors&mode=browse&sel=10013966.
