In this extremely interesting exploration of popular culture and commercial entertainment in late-nineteenth-century Budapest, Mary Gluck makes a convincing argument that it was in the realm of humor magazines, music hall sketches and songs, and middle-brow literary journals that the real debates about the place of Jews in Hungarian society took place. A vibrant modern metropolis with a lively nightlife, Budapest was a city in which Jews represented a quarter of the population and dominated popular culture. They were the producers, entrepreneurs, managers, editors, writers, actors, singers, and much of the audience for this culture. The magazines and music-hall sketches parodied Jewish behavior of all social classes and degrees of assimilation; they unselfconsciously used “Jewish jargon,” which was not Yiddish, but rather German or broken Hungarian; and they laid bare the problems of the so-called Hungarian-Jewish symbiosis and the public posture of modernized Hungarian Jews. At the same time, the humor magazines and music-hall numbers created a modern, alienated, unstable urban identity at the turn of the century, which functioned as a new Jewish identity devoid of Jewish content.
Gluck begins by examining Budapest as a city and the public posture of both the Hungarian liberal establishment and the modern Hungarian Jews. Created in 1873 as an amalgamation of Pest—commercial, substantially German-speaking, and heavily Jewish—with more aristocratic and seemingly Hungarian Buda and Óbuda, Budapest became a commercially vibrant city, with a subversive popular culture that did not conform to the nationalist vision of proper Hungarian behavior. To conservative Hungarian nationalists, who glorified manly, aristocratic behavior, Budapest was a sinful city, not Hungarian, but rather Jewish. Although the liberal political establishment in Hungary had emancipated the Jews in 1867 and opposed the late-nineteenth-century outpouring of populist antisemitism that excluded Jews from the Hungarian nation, Hungarian liberals themselves felt uncomfortable with any public expressions of enduring Jewish identity. They not only expected Jews to assimilate utterly into Hungarian society, but they wanted the Jews to practice “tact” when dealing with antisemitism, that is, not to call attention to it or combat it publicly. Jews—especially those who had secularized and embraced Hungarian language, culture, identity, and patriotism—adopted this tactful posture, hoping that antisemitism would fade away. Although middle-class Jews ostentatiously proclaimed their Hungarianness, the antisemites continued to regard the Jews as foreigners.
In a series of deft readings of magazines and music-hall sketches and songs, Gluck shows how Jewish humorists and performers satirized all these conventions and created a new Budapest identity. They did so in their role as Judenwitzler, tellers of “Jewish jokes,” which were not simply jokes by or about Jews but which used clever word play (considered a Jewish trait) and caricature to lay bare the absurdity of essentialist readings of Jewish or any other identity and to undercut all political agendas. Thus, the humor magazine Borsszem Jankó, edited by Adolf Ágai, created a series of beloved comic figures who displayed the heterogeneity of Hungarian society and its languages. The magazine flaunted stereotypes in order to discredit them. For example, the letters of Itzig Spitzig, a fictional journalist who lived on Király Street, the main thoroughfare of the largely Jewish Terézváros district, appeared in the magazine from 1868 till 1882. Spitzig was a stereotypical Jew with dark, curly hair, a hooked nose, and a crafty face, who wrote in an invented, mangled Hungarian and criticized Jews for trying to appear Hungarian and deny Jewish difference. He advocated no new ideology, but merely affirmed difference. His “successor” as spokesman for the Jews, his brother-in-law Solomon Seiffensteiner, used absurdist humor to mock the antisemites, even noting in one article that the matzah did not taste good this year because they had to use the blood of an old Czech woman instead of a Hungarian Christian girl, a clear allusion to ritual murder charges.
Similarly, in music-hall sketches and songs, Jewish writers and performers savagely satirized the conventions of Hungarian nationalism and bourgeois respectability. The music halls were all located on or off Király Street, which rendered them Jewish in the eyes of the wider society. They presented shows, usually in a Jewish German vernacular, which were often vulgar, sexually explicit, and hugely entertaining. Music hall was democratic, with upper- and lower-class patrons sitting side by side, and it portrayed a world in which inherited status no longer mattered, thus subverting the traditional order. The sketches and songs, preserved in sheet music or as published plays, created a new metropolitan sensibility, identified by the antisemites as Jewish, but which was still modern and subversive without being revolutionary. One popular number, “Without Clothes All People Appear Equal,” written by the songwriter and performer Szőke Szakáll (later the headwaiter in the film Casablanca), epitomized this sensibility. So too did the popular sketch “A Card Game,” which depicted a group of stereotypical Jews cheating at cards and revealed that there is no such thing as a stable Jewish identity.
Popular literary magazines also expressed such views, although they did so in grammatical Hungarian without explicit Jewish references. Between 1893 and 1906, the magazine A Hét contained a series of letters written by “Mrs. Emma,” in fact written by a man, Hugó Veigelsberg, whose penname was Ignotus. In this case of literary crossdressing, a woman created by a man complained about patriarchy and bourgeois domesticity, advocated for feminism and socialism, and revealed the limitations of gender. This was, however, a double act of cross-dressing, Gluck claims, because Ignotus was a Jew attacking Hungarian expectations about Jews in the public arena.
The Invisible Jewish Budapest is an important book. It is informed by anthropological and critical theory, used judiciously by Gluck to explain such issues as the roles of the (Jewish) joker and cross-dresser. The book provides a lively analysis of popular culture and its Jewish dimension, but it also makes a major contribution to our understanding of Hungarian liberalism and the so-called Jewish Question. Hungarian liberals may have invited Jews to join the Hungarian nation, but like nineteenth-century liberals everywhere, they really wanted the Jews to assimilate totally. Most assimilated Jews did not want to disappear as Jews, and continued Jewish distinctiveness created a problem. Gluck's book might have benefited from a broader view encompassing how widespread this problem was among European liberals, but Gluck does point out that one of the issues especially in Hungary was the absence of a non-Jewish bourgeoisie for Jews to join. Liberals and conservatives imagined the model Hungarian as a member of the aristocracy or gentry, groups off limits to Jews. Gluck reveals how the Jews who created Budapest's popular culture found a way to assert Jewish difference while crafting a modern urban identity in the late nineteenth century.
