Antiszemitizmus a falukutatásban
Antisemitism in village ethnography

Bibó and Erdei's early „antisemitism of class-struggle”

Summary/Abstract: The author starts his argument by the discussion of István Bibó’s letter to Gyula Borbándi in which he expresses his thoughts on the antisemitism of the popular movement. On the this basis, the author creates a typology by which he investigates the antisemitism of the principle figures of the popular movement doing ethnography in villages. The paper also focuses on the reasons why István Bibó and Ferenc Erdei refused to sign the public letter opposing the first anti-Jewish law in Hungary. Finally, it studies Erdei’s work entitled The Hungarian Society between the two world wars. The author argues that the literature of village ethnography was embedded into the social athmosphere between the wars that continuously kept on the agenda the „Jewish question”. Some, in the defense of Hungarians, became antirassists, that included also antisemitism, and was related to a sometimes benevolent, sometimes hostile consciousness of ethnic difference, in some cases with also intellectual antisemitism. The author identifies a sort of „antisemitism of class-struggle” in the public gesture of Erdei and Bibó, observable from the 1930s until the deportation of the Jews from Hungary, as an aversion against both the capitalist and the feudal Jew. All this was overwritten later by the recognition in the period of the disaster that such a differentiation con not be made. Besides the „antisemitism of class-struggle”, in Erdei’s work the author also finds the traces of the intellectual antisemitism, that he attributes to the influence of Dezső Szabó and László Németh.

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