Hungary before World War I is the textbook example of Jews siding with the majority in politics. Hungarian Jews Magyarized aggressively in the late nineteenth century, learned Hungarian, took Hungarian names, and aligned with the Magyar nationalist project against the Slovak, Romanian, Croatian, and Ruthenian minorities the Magyars ruled over. Jews became a large part of the Budapest professional and commercial class. The Magyar gentry got a reliable ally that filled the bourgeois roles the gentry disdained, and the Jews got emancipation, prosperity, and protection. The arrangement broke down after 1918 and especially after 1944, but for two generations Hungarian Jewry was inside the dominant ethnic coalition, not against it.
\nImperial Germany shows a softer version. German Jews of the Wilhelmine era were patriotic, often fiercely so. They served in the Kaiser’s army, identified with German high culture, and supported the liberal-national center. The break came later.
\nBritain is the live example in the present. Anglo-Jewry has been more establishmentarian than American Jewry for two centuries. The Cousinhood ran communal life through the Board of Deputies and the United Synagogue and aligned with the British state. Jews voted Conservative in significant numbers long before the Corbyn period, and under Corbyn the community decisively allied with the Tory establishment against the Labour left. The Chief Rabbinate’s intervention in the 2019 election was an establishment move, not a fringe one.
\nSouth Africa under apartheid is awkward. The famous Jewish anti-apartheid figures get the headlines: Slovo, Ruth First, Helen Suzman, Albie Sachs, Kasrils. The mass behavior of South African Jewry ran the other way. Most Jews accepted the racial classification that put them on the White side of the line, voted with the White establishment, and ran businesses inside the apartheid economy. The radicals were a vivid minority. The community was inside the dominant coalition.
\nIran under the Shah, Morocco under the Alawi monarchy, and the Ottoman Empire across centuries all show the same pattern in a different key. Jews aligned with a dynastic ruler who offered protection in exchange for loyalty, and the alliance held against various opposition currents. Sephardic Jews after 1492 became Ottoman subjects and often filled administrative and commercial roles for the Sultan, set against the Christian millets that pushed for autonomy or independence.
\nThe pattern across these cases. Jews side with the majority or the dominant ethno-national coalition where the coalition offers protection, prosperity, and a relatively secure place inside the national story, and where the alternative coalitions are either hostile to Jews or threaten the state that protects them. Jews side with the coalition of the fringes where the dominant majority is Christian in a confessional sense, where it has historically excluded Jews from elite institutions, and where minority coalitions offer a more reliable home. The American case fits the second pattern. The Hungarian, German, British, and Ottoman cases fit the first.
\nWhat changes the alignment is not Jewish nature but the structure of the host society and the offer the dominant coalition is willing to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hungary before World War I is the textbook example of Jews siding with the majority in politics. Hungarian Jews Magyarized aggressively in the late nineteenth century, learned Hungarian, took Hungarian names, and aligned with the Magyar nationalist project against the … Continue reading