É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.

ORMOS, István: Goldziher's Mother Tongue: A Contribution to the Study of the Language Situation in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century

GOLDZIHER'S MOTHER TONGUE Reform-minded Jewish circles in Germany had mixed feelings about the course of events in Hungary: while in theory they wholly approved of the process of emancipation, which went hand in hand with Magyarization, as a result of which Hungarian Jews would ultimately become citizens of equal legal status (i.e. equal to everybody else), they were at the same time unhappy at the eclipse of German culture and especially of the German language: after all, there were as many German-speaking Jews living in Hungary as there were in Germany around the middle of the nineteenth century.

2 ' In the school-year of 1883/1884, Hungarian was the language of instruction in 67.8 percent of Jewish schools in Hungary. By the last years of the century this proportion had already reached 95 percent.

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4 The language situation in Székesfehérvár The same general tendency applied to Goldziher's birthplace, Székesfehérvár (Germ. Stuhlweissenburg), a county town and episcopal see seventy kilometres south-west of Budapest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the German element of the town was decisive: the majority of the population of Székesfehérvár consisted of ethnic Germans, who mostly spoke German in everyday life. They were the descendants of the soldiers and settlers who populated the city after the Austrian army had liberated it from the Ottoman Turkish occupation in 1688. The sparsely populated town, which had been devastated by decades of Turkish marauding, battles and epidemics, was settled mainly by immigrants from the Austrian provinces (including Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia) and various German states. 5 Székesfehérvár was not an unusual case: all over the country the indigenous population of Hungary had suffered greatly under Turkish rule, and their numbers were insufficient to re-populate the devastated localities. For reasons of military security the new imperial administration also preferred German settlers. There was also a very small and gradually diminishing Serbian minority, which dated from the days of Turkish rule.

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2 Pietsch, Reform és ortodoxia..., 53-57. On Magyarization among Jews cf. Katzburg, Fejezetek..., 61-63. 5

4 Felkai, Zsidó iskolázás..., 53. 5

5 Éva Somkuti, 'Székesfehérvár betelepítése a XVII. század fordulóján (1688-1703)' [The Resettlement of Székesfehérvár at the Tum of the 17th Century (1688-1703)], in: Székesfehérvár évszázadai 4. (1688-1848) [Székesfehérvár's Centuries 4. (1688-1703]. Ed. Alán Kralovánszky, Székesfehérvár 1979, 7. 5

6 Gábor Farkas, 'A tőkés társadalom kialakulásának kérdései Székesfehérváron' [The Questions of the Emergence of Capitalist Society in Székesfehérvár], in: Székesfehérvár évszázadai 4. (1688-1848) [Székesfehérvár's Centuries 4. (1688-1703]. Ed. Alán 215