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

ISTVÁN ORMOS employ a Hungarian rhetorician as rabbi in the future."

3 Yet the fact that in 1885 almost twenty years later - it was decided that donations to the synagogue should henceforth be announced in Hungarian instead of German, attests that the use of German had still not died out completely in the community (unless this was just a piece of ritual conservatism)."

4 It is interesting to note in this context that Goldziher's father sided with the reformers, he was one of their staunchest supporters, although he did not participate in the quarrels himself. Moses Wolf Freudenberg, the private tutor of young Goldziher, supported the orthodox party, at the same time teaching the young child to despise both directions, and his close friendship with Goldziher's father did not change either although the two friends attended two different temples engaged in war at the time."

5 Goldziher mentions in the Tagebuch that in the year 1856-1857 he would deliver a sermon in Hungarian each week to his friends, who gathered together for liturgical exercises. The impression given by stating explicitly that the sermon was in Hungarian suggests that the choice was something not quite usual for those days.

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6 The language situation in multilingual communities in general is rendered even more complicated by the phenomenon that the use of languages has different varieties: many people use more than one language, at times even switching from one to the other within the same sentence. In such cases the level of fluency will vary considerably depending on the abilities of the individual: one will often find persons speaking three languages excellently while it is not uncommon to come across trilinguals who speak all three languages equally badly. The spectrum of varieties is broad in multilingualism. The language of Goldziher's parents Goldziher's father, Adolf (Aron Yomtov Lipman) Goldziher was born in 1811 in Köpcsény (Germ. Kittsee or Kitsee

), one of the so-called Seven Communities in the 1,

3 Steinherz, A székesfehérvári zsidók..., 57; Groszmann, Kohn Sámuel..., 26. It may be noted that later Sámuel Kohn (1841-1920) was to live for decades in the same building as Goldziher in Budapest, No. 4 Holló utca. See Frojimovics et al., Jewish Budapest..., 169. There was a deep friendship between the two men: however, Goldziher's emotional instability is clearly mirrored in the eventual changes of his feelings towards his friend. See Goldziher, Tagebuch..., 79-80, 223 and passim. 11

4 Steinherz, A székesfehérvári zsidók..., 90. 11

5 Goldziher, Tagebuch..., 19-22; József Harmat, 'Goldziher Ignác gyermekkora. A székesfehérvári zsidó fiú' [The Childhood of Ignaz Goldziher. The Jewish Boy from Székesfehérvár], in: Bástya. A Vörösmarty Társaság és a Kodolányi János Főiskola antológiája [Bastion. An Anthology of the Vörösmarty Society and the János Kodolányi College] 2004:1, 118-119. 11

6 Goldziher, Tagebuch..., 21. 226