Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 36. (1983)
BARANY, George: Széchényi, America, and Assimilation: An Ambiguous Legacy
Széchenyi, America, and Assimilation 197 Clearly, Széchenyi’s arguments in his two interlocutions of the emancipation debate reveal his assumption of the existence of a pure, Oriental Magyar race inseparable from but not confined to the Magyar vernacular. This racist attitude reflects more the belief in some mystical Magyar strain forming a unique national character than an attitude that excludes or totally negates the desirability of including some perhaps equally valuable members of the human family. Unlike other opponents of Jewish emancipation, he does not paint an entirely negative image of the Jew qua Jew, but projects the Jewish question against the broader background of the nationality question in general. While advocating tolerance for all, at the same time he opposes the immediate democratisation of public life and the granting of full citizenship to Jews, lest the extension of democratic principles to all weaken the Hungarian nobility which he identified as the sustaining force of Magyar nationhood 44). Representing democracy as a danger to Magyar nationality, a concept elevated by Széchenyi into his system of aristocratic values towering above the Germans and Slavs, was the other side of the coin reflecting his apprehensions about the Jews. Given the numerical inferiority of the Jews, who constituted perhaps two per cent of Hungary’s total population, and Széchenyi’s public identification of Jewish mentality with German cultural influence which he feared, his concern about the Jews and their exaggerated adverse impact on Magyardom must be viewed as a reflection of his own theory of assimilation. This, however, implies the assumption of a Jewish people intellectually superior to his romanticized Oriental Magyar stock — an obvious anathema to the race defenders of the interwar period, who tried to portray Széchenyi as their forerunner. As previously mentioned, Széchenyi doubted the wisdom of massive assimilation of Jews in view of the ethnic Magyars’ numerical inferiority to Slavs and Rumanians, and of the intellectual superiority of the German and Jewish “element”. But he sharply condemned the attacks of the mob on the Jewish quarters of Pressburg during the March Revolution of 1848, because he saw in these excesses the beginnings of a war against private property 45). Filled with mounting anxiety in expectation of a struggle against the forces of international reaction and of civil strife with the non-Magyars, he was willing to go along with the emancipation bill reintroduced in Parliament in July in recognition of Jewish support of the Magyar’s anti- Habsburg fight. In the bitter and at times incoherent letters written in the asylum at Döbling (Vienna) after his nervous collapse in September, 1848, 44) Ibid. 356—362: speech of October 3, 1844, in the matter of city representation and administration; Viszota Széchenyi naplói 6 108 and note 2: entry of October 3, 1844. 45) George B a r a n y Magyar Jew or: Jewish Magyar? in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 8 (1974) 11—12; cf. György Spira A Hungarian Count in the Revolution of 1848 (Budapest 1974) 177.
