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 when asked about Goldziher's mother tongue, that of course it had been Hungarian. There was even an edge of indignation in his tone, as if he had been asked a selfevident question: even Goldziher's father, he said, spoke Hungarian in the family circle, because they had been assimilants since the eighteenth century. 17 2 This is a remarkable statement, made by a distant member of the family who was, by his inclinations and profession, interested in history in general and in Hungarian history in particular, and had detailed information and memories about the family. 17 6 His testimony therefore deserves attention. At the same time, a certain caution is in order here, because it is an attested fact that assimilated families of whatever origin tend as far as they can to shed any associations that remind them of their alien roots. Consequently there is a possibility that even if the Goldzihers had spoken Jewishcoloured German within the family, one or two generations later young Géza Hegedűs would have had no knowledge of it, because in his day nobody mentioned it anymore. An irregular conclusion We have seen that very few absolutely accurate statements can be made about this period. Possibility, potentiality, eventuality and probability are everywhere: perhaps, it may be, might have been, probably, most probably, etc, and when dealing with the statement of a contemporary, we cannot necessarily take it at face value, but must somehow interpret it, because meanings are oblique and not what they may seem in a literal sense. All this is due to the complicated, transitional situation that obtained at the time. Representatives of various ethnicities and denominations were living together in a period of rapid transition: even before the period in question they were using different languages in a complicated variety of forms. They may have used Hungarian Family..., vii. This is where Ignaz Goldziher's own version of the history of the family begins. Goldziher, Tagebuch..., 15. Hegedűs also divulges an interesting family secret. As a young girl Ilona, Goldziher's father's sister, fell in love with a young pipemaker. Since there was no hope that they could ever marry because he was a Christian, she escaped through the window one night and ran away with him. She converted to Catholicism, they got married and lived happily ever after. This happened well before 1848. None of llona's numerous descendants today knows anything about the Jewish line in their family; it has always been regarded as a well-kept family secret, just as the affair remained a secret in the Goldziher family, too. Hegedűs, Előjátékok..., 143-146. Ilona does not appear in The Diaspora of a Hungarian Family..., . 17 4 So he told the author of these lines in a telephone conversation a few years before his death. Elsewhere he wrote: "I never saw him in my life but he was my grandmother's cousin." Hegedűs, Előjátékok..., 168, 207. 17 2 Personal communication in 1997. 17 9 See Hegedűs, Előjáték..., 137-215. 241
