Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
Relics of the Jewish Middle Ages in Buda
cultural influences, an Oriental style of Western synagogue architecture. In Hungary, and specifically in Budapest and its old Jewish quarter, these buildings survive to this day. They should be preserved and protected as World Heritage sites in conjunction with a revitalised urban environment. They should be preserved, among others, for the "stranger, that is not of thy people Israel, but cometh out of a far country for thy name's sake”. Relics of the Jewish Middle Ages in Buda Broadly interpreted, the antecedents of Jewish relics fall into two categories separated by a long period of time. Traces as old as those of the ancient Jewish diaspora formed after the Roman subjugation of Judea in the ist century A.D. have been found in the territory of Hungary. Historians believe that the Magyar tribes of the migration period that followed the first diaspora by almost a thousand years were subjected to the Khazar khanate for a while and were thus touched by Judaic influences. Some of the chieftains were converted here to the Jewish faith. Three Khazar tribes, the Kabars, who were defeated in an internal war, joined the Magyars in their wanderings and subsequent conquest of the Carpathian Basin. That is what the Hungarian-language preacher of the "Dohány” synagogue, the world-famous Orientalist Sámuel Kohn, asserted on the basis of late 19th-century finds and textual analysis using methodology he devised. In the first centuries of the emergence of Hungary as a state, there is no sign of any discriminatory practices against the Jews. According to historian Lajos Venetianer, ”[tlhe Magyars conquering the Carpathian Basin lived in peace and mutual understanding with the Jews and their descendants found here, who abandoned—in their coexistence and interdependence—those few aspects of their religious life which might have inhibited peaceful understanding.” In his The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and ltd Heritage, a work whose precise literary or academic genre is hard to determine, Arthur Koestler expounds an even more daring theory, arguing that the Jews of Eastern Europe are Ashkenazi in name only ('Germans', i.e. those having come from the West) and that they are in reality of Eastern, Khazar-Karaite origin. Koestler and a Polish historian contend that the Jewish population of Hungary after the Magyar conquest was not made up of Western Jews either but Khazars, the "thirteenth tribe”. Is that legend or myth? The only scholarly method of finding an answer is largely based on archival research, as hardly any archaeological evidence has been turned up by excavations. The reburied Táncsics utca find, discussed 8
