Századok – 1995

Tanulmányok - Sándor Pál: Az emancipáció történetéhez Magyarországon 1840–1849 II/285

334 SÁNDOR PÁL The author has found it very important to view this chapter of emancipation as part of the history of the Hungarian society in the period. This is a novel approach that has not characterized earlier writings on Jewish emancipation. The study is divided into several chapters and deals also with the situation abroad. It goes back to the 18th century antecendents of the question and illustrated the reasons of the ever increasing Jewish immigration with statistical data, to say nothing of the social stratification, occupation and characteristic territorial distribution of the Jewish population. The study introduces the relevant decree of Joseph Ii and the acts of the period imposing strict limitations on Jewish bourgeois growth. The chapter „The Caricature and its Social Function" deserves special attention. The author discusses here the hostile social background of the Hungarian Jewry in Hungary also in the period in question. At the same time the author lays great stress on introducing the efforts of growing Hungarian liberalism at emancipation and the fundamental role of the liberal nobility's ideals of liberty in achieving civil rights. The discussion of Kossuth's concept of assimilation also deserves attention as well as the analysis of the concequences of this concept in practice, the first attempt of this nature in Hungarian historiography. The most important chapter of the study is the one dealing with the role of the Hungarian Jewry in the revolution and war of independence of 1848/49. Quite a number of hitherto unknown events are told here, which were integral parts of Hungarian history but have not been given a synthetic approach so far.