Jews in Hungary had the unique experience of living in the first European state to introduce anti-Jewish legislation in the modern era (the 1920 numerus clausus that restricted Jewish university attendance) and the last state to implement wide-scale deportations during the Holocaust (beginning in May 1944). This gave Hungarian Jews a long period to reflect upon Europe's “transnational anti-Jewish turn,” and many of them responded with intellectual projects that tried to articulate the tragedies they saw unfolding (7). Ferenc Laczó’s Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929–1948 analyzes these abundant, diverse works that he argues have long been ignored by historians. In the process, he tells a nuanced story of a community in crisis and provides an important corrective to the oversimplified picture historians often paint of unflaggingly assimilationist Hungarian Jews that refused to heed the warnings of the ever-increasing threats to their existence.

The early chapters of Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide are the most orthodox in terms of their sources and methodology for intellectual history. Chapters two through four survey the main trends in a number of Jewish literary journals and yearbooks during the 1930s and early years of World War II. By comparing several different authors and publications, Laczó uncovers a spectrum of intellectual responses to impending tragedy, from “semi-liberal attempts at compromise” with the progressively more exclusionary Hungarian government to the articulation of “nationalist programs and the vision of a corporatist order” (78). Thus, he argues, the Hungarian Jewish community reflected the ideological trends of broader Hungarian society in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chapter five takes on a very different type of source, the DEGOB (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság) protocols, a rich and grossly underutilized collection of postwar survivor testimonies collected in 1945 and 1946 by the National Committee for Attending Deportees. By investigating how survivors articulated their experiences in a time before Nazi methods of persecution and extermination were necessarily common knowledge, Laczó reveals that interviewees “offered crucial distinctions between various Nazi camps,” categorizing some with the term Vernichtungslager (annihilation camp) while others were described simply as camps (using both the German Lager and the Hungarian tábor) (132). These distinctions would, of course, later become a crucial part of the larger narrative of the Holocaust. The final chapters of Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide look at some of the first memoirs reflecting on deportation and camp experiences published in post–World War II Hungary and the incredibly detailed histories of Jewish persecution written by Hungarian survivors in the immediate postwar era. Laczó is at his best when comparing the works of Ernő Munkácsi, Jenő Lévai, and Endre Sós, whose early Holocaust histories set many of the research questions concerning the Holocaust in Hungary that scholars still follow today, such as the complicity of the Hungarian government and gendarmerie; the role of Hungarian Jewish elites and the Jewish Council in the tragedy; and the material motives of the genocide, aimed at confiscating Jewish wealth.

Laczó uses a wide variety of sources to illuminate the many methods of Jewish intellectual engagement during the “Age of Genocide.” Still, a curious omission, given his methodological focus on authors who wrote in the Hungarian language and “expressed a level of Jewish self-consciousness” is the Yizkor Memorial Books published by many local Hungarian communities to commemorate those who lost their lives during the Holocaust (17). Because many of the Yizkor books from Hungary were published in both Hungarian and Hebrew and very consciously reflected on both Hungarianness and Jewishness in their memorialization, they seem to meet Laczó’s stated criteria for his intellectual history quite seamlessly. By contrast, the inclusion in chapter six of non-Jewish narratives of deportation—some of which quite conspicuously omit discussions of Jewish persecution—goes against those same criteria Laczó enumerated in the introduction. For these reasons, Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide is more a collection of essays on various aspects of Jewish (and non-Jewish) thought in response to questions of identity, violence, and exclusionary politics rather than a unified monograph that closely follows a single subject or weaves easily identifiable narrative threads through multiple chapters. Laczó does succeed, however, in convincing readers that Hungarian Jews ably performed the task of “preserv[ing] what was left of the European Jewish heritage … [and] beginning to record the unprecedented destruction of Jewish people from across the continent” (1). Laczó’s subjects were indeed instrumental in performing much of the early work of witnessing, chronicling, and historicizing the genocide and in establishing many of the questions historians still seek answers to today.