Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 36. (1983)
BARANY, George: Széchényi, America, and Assimilation: An Ambiguous Legacy
196 George Bárány rhetorically, would not he be justified to “conserve” his own and to toss out the other? He who sincerely wanted to protect the Magyar nationality, said Széchenyi, could not possibly “grant favors at the expense of the [Magyar] nationality to an element that has more intelligence and more diligence”. Although he believed that the cause of Magyardom was now on firmer ground, especially as a result of the new language law, Széchenyi was reluctant to go beyond the concessions given to the Jews by the legislation enacted at the Diet of 1839—1840 advising “to enlarge our boat a little further” only with the gradual “consolidation of our nationality” 41). That Jews were an alien race, essentially “unmeltable”, and that their too rapid assimilation was undesirable, was an argument used by many an otherwise enlightened Gentile in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century 42 *). In this respect, Széchenyi was not unique. But his insistence that he was not biased against Jews as such, that he respected all of God's creatures, that he was “certainly no enemy of Jewry, appreciated their progress and what they had done for the [Magyar] nationality”, was all the more remarkable because he reinforced it in a second interlocution addressed to Count Charles Zay, Superintendent of the Lutheran Church and an ardent magyarizer of Slovaks. Széchenyi cautioned Zay that though he tried to protect the Hungarian ship against the Pan-Slav threat, other elements might fill and cause it to founder. To Zay’s objection that „a few miserable Jews could not endanger the Magyar nationality”, Széchenyi sarcastically replied that he would not dare label “an entire class that prides itself of so much property and of so many respectable men” as a miserable people. But he quoted the poet Berzsenyi’s words about the oak that withstood the storms of centuries but was felled by tiny insects sapping its inner strength. Hungary was not strong enough, he argued, to digest “all other nationalities” and being a reconvalescent nation herself, she could not absorb one nationality after the other, and concluded: “There is no question of excluding any of God’s creatures from rights, because according to my views and religious sentiments, I should like to see every man created in the image of God to possess equal rights in this country and to bear equal burdens so that all could say that they, too, have a fatherland here regardless of their religion! This is my ultimate goal, and that is the port toward which I sail: but as a loyal member of the Magyar race, I must confess, that I shall never throw my own child out of the boat for others, prompted by ultraliberalism and by an excessive motivation. I can appreciate the same loyalty in every other nation; since, however, the Creator created us as Magyars, let us be Magyars, and purely Magyars” 4S). 41) Ibid. 352—354. For the Diet of 1839—1840 cf. B a r a n y Széchenyi 356— 359. 42) Jacob Katz Out of the Ghetto (New York 1973) 80—103. 4S) Zichy Széchenyi beszédei 354—356.
