In The Invisible Jewish Budapest, Mary Gluck reconstitutes select concrete and symbolic spaces where urban history and Jewish history met and collided in fin-de-siècle Hungary. Focusing on key members of two generations of cultural innovators, the author explores varied cultural phenomena such as popular journalism, the coffeehouse, the music hall, the humor magazine, and the mid-cult literary journal. These inquiries reveal how modernist culture, closely associated with the Jewish presence in the city, challenged foundational definitions of identity and spread irreverence, subversion, and irony that came to largely define the metropolitan spirit of Budapest until the present day.
Individual chapters of the book deal with attempts to define the nature of Budapest urban culture; the inherently political dimensions of cultural representations of the so-called Jewish question; the bifurcation of the urban sphere and how distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable public discourses about Jewish subjects were drawn; Jewish humor and the Jewish music hall as two pivotal expressions of Budapest Jewish public culture; and last but not least, the anomalies of the Jewish bourgeoisie and its identity crisis in an age that, in the eyes of the author, has all too often been approached with a tinge of nostalgia.
The Invisible Jewish Budapest begins by exploring the early writers of urban texts who gave voice to their hopes, uncertainties, and anxieties in the fast-growing metropolis and created lasting stereotypes about urban life and character. Gluck argues that Jewish urban writers such as József Kiss, Henrik Lenkei, or Adolf Ágai transcended the contradictions and paradoxes of their specific social situation to become the cultural insiders of the modern metropolis and link Jews to the cultural landscape of Budapest. In other words, their urban narratives may not have “contained and stabilized” the modern city, but they contained and helped stabilize their Jewish identities, argues Gluck.
Chapter two of the book explores the fissures exposed by Hungarian liberalism as early as the 1880s, and how the horizon of Jewish emancipation was irreversibly transformed upon the ritual murder charge of Tiszaeszlár and the practically simultaneous immigration controversy targeting Jewish refugees from Russia. Dissecting the ambiguities and paradoxes of Hungary's political culture, Gluck polemically asserts that both Hungarian liberalism and antisemitism “subscribed to the notion of an existentially threatened national community whose very survival hinged on the presence or absence of Jews in its midst” (58). One of the key conclusions she draws is that Hungarian liberalism was largely exhausted by formulaic references to principles, and it was only in the realms of humor and popular entertainment that essentialist assumptions and dogmatic approaches to the Jewish question were systematically questioned and ironically deflated.
Chapter three in turn aims to show how leading Hungarian Jewish politician Mór Wahrmann embodied the contradictions of Hungarian liberalism in an acute and self-conscious form. More broadly, it provides a reflection on the paradoxical status of Jews, who were treated as equal and unequal at the same time. Drawing on a popular joke of the time, Gluck asserts that in Hungarian politics Jewish politicians functioned much like ambassadors from a nonexistent nation. She subsequently analyzes how Wahrmann was a brilliant pragmatist who wielded influence through indirection and used humor to confront ideological notions. She imaginatively combines this with a discussion of how Wahrmann's standard caricatures made explicit and public what he kept implicit and private. Whereas the chapter's discussion of the informal rules and conventions guiding public behavior and the large role that self-monitoring and self-censorship played in enforcing them offers valuable insights, it remains unexplored to what extent these constituted specific conundrums for Jews and to what extent they defined Hungarian political culture more generally.
Chapter four dissects the Judenwitz, which Mary Gluck conceives as the mirror image of the Jewish question. She shows how the biting and at times downright provocative Jewish humor of the Hungarian metropolis was inseparably intertwined with the parodic manipulation of negative Jewish stereotypes—the comic representation of Jews exposed the flawed logic of antisemitism and its incompatibility with reality. While Gluck emphasizes that Jewish humor had cultural and symbolic rather than practical or political purposes, she also asserts that its ironic deflation of hotly contested issues helped create alternative cultural conditions and fostered relatively harmonious coexistence in a diverse and tension-ridden society. As the author shows, such humor may have remained controversial in Hungarian society and politics, but it clearly had wide appeal—the magazine Borsszem Jankó in particular succeeded at establishing it as an acknowledged part of the national tradition. The next chapter on the music halls of Budapest's Terézváros district combines an institutional approach to commercial features of this institution with an analysis of the music hall experience as well as an exploration of some key cultural-ideological issues. The author sketches how the music halls were simultaneously an expression of lower middle-class life, metropolitan consciousness, bohemian innovation, and Jewish self-expression, and how they implicitly challenged national ideals and bourgeois norms by reconstituting the very nature of modern experience and identity.
In the last major chapter of the book, Gluck devotes attention to the paradoxical perceptions and expectations Jews and Hungarian had of each other. She insightfully remarks that their enthusiastic embrace of Hungarian patriotism only heightened Jews’ sense of marginalization, whereas the acculturation of Jewish Hungarians they explicitly demanded in fact only strengthened non-Jewish Hungarians' sense of a growing Jewish threat (172). The chapter also ponders over the two contradictory tasks Jews were expected to fulfil in modern Hungary: to serve as a model for the bourgeoisie while “assimilating to a nonexistent national middle class” (180). As Gluck indicates, lacking the possibility to socially or ideologically define itself, the Jewish bourgeoisie in Budapest was to assume the voices of “subaltern” subjects such as women, workers, or other disadvantaged groups, integrating its perceived marginalization as Jews within a universal narrative of human freedom and emancipation. The chapter comes to the ironic conclusion that the identity crisis of an invisible Jewish bourgeoisie may have found partial resolution through the appropriation of the universal cause of human emancipation, but this partial resolution was going to undermine the very identity it was supposed to give voice to (201).
The Invisible Jewish Budapest offers a series of imaginative and captivating essays, which at times arrive at sweeping conclusions. Gluck insightfully explores how the popular culture and commercial entertainment of metropolitan Budapest invented new forms of Jewish sociability and self-identity and made Jewish difference visible. Her book does a great service by pointing to the profound gap between political rhetoric and cultural discourse in liberal Hungary; even as Jewish selves were to remain unmarked in the public spaces, Jewish difference was rendered hypervisible in everyday culture. However, the assertion that the “true context of modern Jewish identity” lay neither in the interior space of bourgeois domesticity, nor in the official public realm of political life, but rather “in institutions of urban culture” sounds overly categorical (171). Furthermore, the author comes to the rather debatable conclusion that in the realm of everyday life, Jewish Budapest might have been distinctly bourgeois, but “in its cultural style and literary imagination, it was unmistakably bohemian” (185). While Mary Gluck provides suggestive evidence to support these statements, just how generalizable her findings are would require further research in the fascinating new directions her book suggests.
