Description

„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.

Tamás Stark received his PhD from the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities in 1993. From 1983 he was a researcher at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2000 he was appointed a senior research fellow. His specialization is forced population movement in East-Central Europe in the period 1938-56, with special regard to the history of the Holocaust, the fate of prisoners of war and civilian internees, and the postwar migration. In 2014 he was Fulbright visiting professor at the Nazareth College, in Rochester USA. His main publications include Hungary’s Human Losses in World War II (Uppsala, 1995), Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War, 1939-1949: A Statistical Review (Boulder, CO, 2000), Magyar foglyok a Szovjetunióban. [Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Union] (Budapest, 2006) „...akkor aszt mondták kicsi robot” – A magyar polgári lakosság elhurcolása a Szovjetunióba korabeli dokumentumok tükrében. [The deportation of civilians to the Soviet Union in the light of contemporary documents] (Budapest, 2017)