Abstract
This article will demonstrate how the Habsburg historian István Deák always paid significant attention in his scholarship to the role of Jews in Central European society. In his first book on left-wing intellectuals in Weimar Germany, his 1979 study of Louis Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, his magnum opus on the Habsburg army officer corps (1990), and his later work on collaboration and resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, Deák revealed much about both the assimilation of Jews into European society and their rejection by that society. In his book on Kossuth, Deák demonstrated the ambivalence of the revolutionaries, whose liberalism impelled them to emancipate the Jews at the same time as many thought them incapable of Magyarization. Ultimately, it was Jewish loyalty to the Hungarian cause that made the Hungarian revolutionaries extend equal rights to the Jews. In his book on the army officers, Deák clearly demonstrated how the late Habsburg army refused to allow anti-Jewish prejudice to flourish. Unfortunately, many Habsburg Jewish officers were deported to the death camps during World War II.
I came to Columbia University in 1972 to study modern Jewish history. Since I was interested in the Jews in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I also studied European history, taking courses in German, French, and Habsburg history. I therefore first met István Deák in his lecture course on the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 to 1918. I was immediately entranced, both by Deák’s incisive historical mind and by the monarchy itself, with its enormous diversity of peoples, religions, and social classes. Deák was then working on his book on Louis Kossuth, the great leader of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, and he delighted us with how Kossuth and the Hungarians felt loyalty to emperor/king even as they struggled for Hungarian independence. What a wonderfully interesting and complex place the monarchy was, I thought.
When I was considering a dissertation topic, I decided to do a social history of the Jews of Vienna, focusing on the process of assimilation to German-Austrian society and how most Jews retained some sense of Jewish identification despite their desire to assimilate. István offered to be my dissertation advisor, and I gladly accepted. By that time (May 1975), the senior person in Jewish history, Zvi Ankori, had left Columbia, and he was not replaced for five years. I was an orphan, but István thankfully adopted me. I have been eternally grateful ever since, not only because István was a fabulous advisor and genuine mensch, but because he understood the process of Jewish assimilation quite intimately, even though he was a product of a more total form of assimilation than I was concerned with. The descendant of four Jewish grandparents from Székesfehérvár, Hungary, who had adopted Hungarian language and a fervent Hungarian loyalty, and the son of parents who converted to Catholicism around the time he was born in order to become more fully Hungarian, István nevertheless had sympathy and understanding for the Jews I studied: Jews from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia, who migrated to Vienna, became Viennese, but asserted their Jewishness in many complex ways. And despite some initial skepticism, he was also sympathetic to the new computerized methods of data analysis that I used to analyze birth, marriage, and tax records. He trusted me to use such sources wisely and well, and he made sure that I avoided all sociological jargon in my dissertation.
In this essay, I would like to show how István Deák always included the Jews in his historical analyses and reconstructions. When many historians either ignored the Jews or said a few perfunctory things about them, Deák was acutely sensitive to the role that they played in European history, especially in Central and East Central Europe, and he presented them with sympathy and understanding. From his first book on left-wing intellectuals in Weimar Germany, to his second book on Louis Kossuth, his third on the Habsburg army officer corps, and all his later works on Nazi Europe (not to mention his more popular essays for publications like The New York Review of Books), István paid serious attention to the Jews and used them to understand European societies more fully. Perhaps because of his Jewish origins and the fact that he and his family suffered as Jews after the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944, István knew that no history of European society could ignore the fraught and complicated place of the Jews within it. Indeed, the very fact that Hungarian society furiously rejected its Jewish citizens, despite their intense loyalty, made him seek to understand the Jews. Although they never were the main focus of his scholarship, the place of the Jews always loomed large in his work.
Deák’s sense that it was important to pay attention to the Jews was apparent in his first book (based on his Columbia dissertation), Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle.1 Most studies of left-wing intellectuals paid no attention to the important question of why so many of them were Jews or of Jewish origins. Deák confronted the question head on and formulated an answer which I thought was compelling and astute. He insisted that Jews had created the left-wing intellectual movement in Germany because, despite their bourgeois status and education, they had long been excluded from positions in the civil service and the university. Jews therefore recognized that such careers did not solve the “Jewish problem” and Weimar society itself needed transformation. Unlike conservative critics of Weimar society, left-wing intellectuals remained committed to democracy.
Marsha Rozenblit with István Deák at his ninetieth birthday celebration, Columbia University, 2016. (Photo courtesy of the author)
Marsha Rozenblit with István Deák at his ninetieth birthday celebration, Columbia University, 2016. (Photo courtesy of the author)
In The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849, a brilliant and clear-eyed analysis of the revolution of 1848 and the nature of Hungarian nationalism and liberalism in that period, Deák provided a fair and balanced understanding of the relationship between the Jews and the Hungarian national liberals who led the revolution.2 He emphasized that Kossuth and other liberals, like liberals elsewhere in Europe, were happy to give Jews equal rights, but they expected them to assimilate, to give up aspects of Judaism considered abhorrent to European liberal sensibilities, and (in Hungary) to Magyarize fully. Many thought Jews should change as a prerequisite for receiving equal rights. Some of the leaders of the revolution even harbored anti-Jewish views and opposed granting them suffrage or the right to serve in a militia. Indeed, the Hungarian liberal press was filled with antisemitic clichés and fears that Jews might become parliamentary deputies, civil servants, even noblemen. In a wonderful turn of phrase, Deák noted that liberal Count István Széchényi “disliked the Jews more than was customary for an aristocrat.”3 Yet, in July 1849, when the Hungarian parliament fully emancipated the Jews, there was no debate. Revolutionary leaders emancipated the Jews, Deák insists, not only because of their liberal commitments but also because the Jews had been so loyal to the Hungarian revolutionary cause, far more than many Christian Magyars.
In this book, Deák also analyzed the pogrom violence against Jews in many Hungarian cities in the spring of 1848, especially in Pressburg/Pozsony (today Bratislava) and Pest, attributing the violence largely to the resentment of German burghers of Jewish economic competitors. Such violence, Deák argued, made some revolutionaries fear that granting Jews rights might lead to slaughter. Thus, despite Kossuth’s condemnation of pogrom violence and his protests against excluding Jews from suffrage, in April 1848 Jews were not given the right to vote. In the face of external enemies in the fall of 1848, however, Jews were finally allowed into the militias. Jews responded with massive support for the revolutionary cause, including large-scale enlistment. Jews achieved relatively high ranks as officers in the militias, perhaps not the highest ranks, but no commoners achieved the highest ranks. Jewish support for the revolution, Deák reminds us, led not only to punishment by the victorious Austrians but also induced many Slavs in Hungary to associate Jews with aggressive Magyar nationalism (something that would become problematic in interwar Slovakia).
Deák very sensitively explored the role of Jews in Austro-Hungarian society in his magnum opus, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918.4 In this extraordinary study of the ethos of officers in the Joint Army, Deák demonstrated how despite antisemitism in many sectors of society, including among many officers, the army was open to Jews, who therefore formed a sizeable contingent of all reserve officers. In a country in which they formed 4 percent of the total population, Jews constituted about 18 percent of all reserve officers (not counting medical officers) around the turn of the twentieth century. The army fairly administered its policy of drawing reserve officers from the ranks of “one-year volunteers,” that is, Gymnasium students who were trained to be officers’ candidates, and Jews formed a sizeable portion of Gymnasium (and university) students all over the monarchy. It also helped that many Jews knew German. In Austria-Hungary the emperor/king, army officials, and the regimental assemblies all agreed that Jews were loyal and should be reserve officers—unlike in Prussia, where prejudice against the Jews meant that the king, the war ministry, and the regiments themselves “silently conspired” to exclude Jews from the ranks of reserve officers; and this despite the fact that Prussia also recruited reserve officers from the ranks of one-year volunteers, many of whom were Jews.5 Jewish numbers in the ranks of reserve officers declined slightly in the early years of the twentieth century but went up again during World War I. To be sure, very few Jews served as career officers (1.2% in 1897 and 0.6% in 1911), but those who did choose a military career were promoted to the highest levels. Deák explains that the small number was due to the fact that the military lifestyle was completely alien to Jews. Those that chose a career as an army officer did so to assimilate completely, and many converted. The army, which took the honor of all its officers very seriously, even thwarted attempts of antisemitic officers to refuse to duel with Jews. Regimental honors commissions regularly ruled against antisemites who would not duel with Jews, threatening them with losing their rank. Deák concluded the book on an anguished note: during World War II, the Nazis deported many decorated and loyal Austro-Hungarian Jewish officers to the death camps.
Deák also presents a positive view of the Jewish role in the army in general. Many career officers stationed in Galicia, Bukovina, and northeastern Hungary benefited from the services of a Mobeljüd, a local Hasid who helped them find housing, furniture, clothing, and other things they needed. Many officers must have regarded these men as angels in caftans and sidelocks, he warmly notes. To be sure, these officers may have regarded the eastern parts of the monarchy as filled with “cunning Jews,” but they enjoyed going to Jewish weddings. Deák also sympathetically explained the lower percentage of Jewish men drafted into the army (3.1%) compared to their percentage in the total population (4%), attributing it to Jewish migration to America, the large number of Jewish one-year volunteers caused by disproportionate Jewish attendance in gymnasia and universities, or even because draft boards may have been reluctant to accept Jews. During World War I, Jews served in proportion to their share in the population, largely because they were enthusiastic about serving against the Russian enemy. Antisemites complained that Jewish casualty rates were lower than non-Jewish ones, but Deák pointedly refutes the antisemites by explaining that Jews, who often knew German and had higher education, were more likely to be sent to the more secure artillery, medical corps, or military administration, rather than to infantry units at the front (which were largely filled with peasants).
Much of Deák’s later work was on Nazi Europe, and in that work he paid much attention to the exclusion of the Jews from European society. He evinced great sympathy for Jews in the ghettos of Poland, for Jews deported from all over Europe to the death camps, and for the dilemmas that Jews experienced all over. Much of this work was synthetic. In books including Essays on Hitler’s Europe and Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II, Deák did not focus on the Jews, but what the Nazis and Nazi collaborators all over Europe did to the Jews formed an important part of his analysis.6 For many years he wrote regular reviews of books on the Holocaust for The New York Review of Books, a magazine through which he thought he reached more people, especially in East Central Europe, than with his scholarly books. True, but his scholarship profoundly influenced so many historians all over Europe and North America. He was an important world-class historian who reminded us of the complexities of life in East Central Europe for all its inhabitants. He knew the aspirations and the pains of the Jewish struggle with modernity, and his insights infused all his work.
Notes
István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
István Deák, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
Ibid., 114.
István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Ibid., 174–75.
István Deák, Essays on Hitler’s Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Deák, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015).
