In The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921, Béla Bodó, a professor of east European history at the University of Bonn, has done an impressive job analyzing the brutal antisemitic violence that erupted in Hungary during the counter-revolutionary response to the short-lived communist regime of Béla Kun. Bodó insists that the violence was not organized by Miklós Horthy or his regime but rather was entirely the work of officers’ detachments, civic and student militias, and patriotic organizations that blamed the Jews for Hungary's multiple post-WWI crises: military defeat, loss of territory, food shortages, inflation, unemployment, and especially the three-month communist regime. Assuming all Jews were exploiters, traitors, and communists, the men in these militias attacked, plundered, raped, killed, and mutilated Jews. Bodó estimates that between 1,250 and 2,500 Jews were killed and tens of thousands injured. Indeed, more Jews suffered violence in Hungary between 1919–1921 than in all nineteenth century antisemitic incidents in Europe and 4–5 times more than in Poland after WWI, even if Hungarian violence paled in comparison to the anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine during the Civil War.

Relying on theories of violence and comparative works on interethnic and political violence in other regions, especially lynchings in America, as well as meticulous research in archives and court records, Bodó analyzes the perpetrators of antisemitic violence, paying close attention to the social composition of the militias that attacked Jews, the differences between the charismatic leaders and the rank and file, and how they used violence to position themselves in local Hungarian society. His overarching argument is that this violence took place because of the “retreat of the state” in the aftermath of WWI, that is, the absence of a strong state that could prevent such violence. Only when Horthy firmly established his authority in 1921 did the violence subside. Moreover, Bodó insists that the brutalization of soldiers and society during the war, compounded by post-war unemployment, especially among former reserve officers and refugees from occupied Hungarian territory, and the overwhelming fear of communism among the gentile middle classes, led many to desire for revenge against the Jews.

Bodó focuses on several important militias, especially the Pronáy and the Osztenburg detachments. Many of the leaders of these militias were from noble families, including Pál Pronáy himself. Most of the officers and all of the rank and file, however, came from the provincial middle classes, with an important addition of unemployed agricultural laborers, but generally not peasants. Bodó also distinguishes between the “violence artists,” whether outsiders from the military detachments or local leaders of antisemitic organizations, who instigated violence against the Jews and the “foot soldiers” who carried it out. The agitators wanted to protect Hungary from the Jews; the foot soldiers wanted to loot and steal. The resultant pogroms often led to murder. So too did the incarceration of Jews and other “enemies” in prisons and internment camps, where many died because of brutal conditions. In several horrifying fine-grained analyses, Bodó details the activities and behavior of these detachments, including their penchant for high living in hotels, where they interrogated and tortured their prisoners.

Comparing “Red” and “White” violence in Hungary, Bodó clearly demonstrates that although communists killed many people, they only attacked their political enemies, while the White militias singled out the Jews. Indeed, Jews formed 25–50% of all the victims of the White Terror. He also reveals that while most of the perpetrators of violence feared communism, they had not suffered under the communist regime. It was their Jewish victims who had suffered when the communists nationalized large scale businesses. Moreover, many of those who attacked the Jews did so simply because they wanted to get rid of Jewish competitors. The sheer level of viciousness of the perpetrators is striking. Bodó details how those who brutally murdered Jews first deprived them of the markers of their bourgeois status and their membership in the community of human beings.

The White Terror does have some problems. It contains both too much theory and too much detail about violent episodes, and it is sometimes repetitive. One minor problem: Bodó calls the Chief Rabbi of Vienna Perez Chajes Hirsch (93), but his name was Hirsch Perez Chajes. Criticisms aside, Bodó has written an important book about antisemitism in Hungary. He shows how this antisemitism led to the numerus clausus law of 1920, restricting Jewish enrollment at Hungarian universities, the first step in reading Jews out of the Hungarian nation. This antisemitic violence also contributed later to Hungarian participation in the Holocaust.