Jews Between Hungary and Austria

By Asaf Segal Doron

In December 1860, following a decade of neo-absolute rule, Hungary, then a part of the Habsburg Monarchy, regained its legal autonomy. This restoration posed a significant legal challenge: legislators had to determine which system of law should prevail – Austrian statutory law, which had been in force in Hungary since 1851, or the traditional Hungarian legal system, which primarily relied on custom. To address this conundrum, the Hungarian High Judge, György Apponyi, convened sixty of the era's leading legal experts and politicians. Over the course of eighteen meetings, held between January and March 1861, these participants of the High Judge Conference (HJC) deliberated on various legislative domains, including inheritance law and criminal law.

In the case of both inheritance and criminal law, the members of the HJC were unanimous in their rejection of the Austrian legislation, which they regarded as a foreign imposition on Hungary against its will and legal traditions. Consequently, they resolved to restore the old Hungarian law. This, however, was coupled with amendments intended to align the laws with the “spirit of the time,” particularly the liberal legislation introduced in Hungary in 1848. The principal aspect of this modern spirit was the concept of equality before the law. While this term appeared in various legislative documents starting in 1848, it was never explicitly defined by either contemporaries or historians.

A discourse analysis of the HJC protocols reveals that for its members, equality before the law was fundamentally a matter of equalizing social class distinctions. For instance, when discussing criminal law, participants focused on the criteria for corporal punishment and exemption from it, examining factors such as social class, economic status, and educational attainment. Furthermore, in both criminal law and inheritance law, the discussions touched upon gender, specifically questioning whether and how women should be exempted from corporal punishment and allowed to inherit property.

Notably, the HJC discussions seldom addressed another distinct matter: religion. This absence is particularly significant regarding Hungarian Jewry, as Judaism was labeled a “tolerated” religion until 1895, and thus its members had no political rights. 

The HJC discussed the legal status of Jews only in isolated contexts; they were nearly absent from the HJC’s deliberations. Most striking is the absence of any discussion on Jewish emancipation. Despite considerable public discourse on this topic in the 1860s and the strengthening ties between Jews and the nobility throughout the 1850s and 1860s, the HJC never addressed the question of granting political rights to Jews or the broader question of religious equality in its eighteen sessions. 

The HJC also neglected other Jewish matters, including rights of settlement and land ownership. Previously, Jews in Hungary had been prohibited from settling in cities and within a seven-mile radius of mining towns. Some of these restrictions were partially lifted in 1840 by an imperial law that permitted Jewish settlement in cities. Further imperial legislation from early 1860 abolished the prohibition on Jewish settlement in mining towns and made Jews eligible to own land and acquire agricultural properties and farms. 

Despite the significance of these imperial acts for the legal status of Jews in Hungary, they were not addressed in the HJC deliberations. This instance presents a unique case where Austrian-originated legislation remained undisputed, unlike other deliberations that consistently characterized Austrian laws as invalid and favored their earlier Hungarian counterparts. The silence respecting Austrian laws on Jewish settlement, combined with the direct negation of most other Austrian laws, suggests that, regarding Jewish affairs, a rare consensus existed between Budapest and Vienna.

The omission of Jews from the discussions on legal equality may teach us more about the attitude toward Jewish emancipation in the 1860s than it does about the actual meaning of equality before the law. By refraining from opposing imperial legislation concerning Jews, the HJC seems to have treated Jewish emancipation as a settled matter for Hungarians. In this context, an open condemnation of Austrian legislation on Jewish rights would have contradicted the Hungarian desire to emancipate Jews and effectively nullified efforts toward that objective. Even more significantly, the Jewish case indicates that the relationship between Austria and Hungary in the years leading up to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was dynamic and pragmatic, a complexity I hope to explore in future research.

 

 

György Apponyi (1808-1899)

 

The cover page of the protocols of the Hungarian High Judge Conference, published in 1861.