Humanitarian Encounters: Charity and Gender in Post–World War I Jewish Budapest

Abstract

Across East Central Europe, World War I and its violent aftermath impacted Jewish perspectives on home and homeland and forced many Jews to reconsider, reformulate, and at times even discard previous beliefs about the idea of national belonging. In Hungary, the White Terror of the early 1920s set off shock waves among the population of mainly urban Hungarian Jews, who until then had imagined themselves relatively safe. As social exclusion entered public and domestic life, it deeply influenced the way Jews imagined themselves at home in postwar Hungary. This article examines the ways in which Jewish women navigated the transitional period between war and peace in Hungary, and asks how the postwar years affected their sense of belonging and notions of home. Apart from being catapulted into public life, how did women navigate the intersection of antisemitism, physical violence, and displacement? How, for instance, did Jewish women react to the influx of Jewish refugees from Galicia, among them many children, who arrived in Budapest in great numbers seeking shelter and aid? Did the displacement of East European Jews affect existing notions of charity and Jewish identity among the women involved in humanitarian aid? And finally, how did war, revolution, and violence change Jewish women’s sense of identity as Hungarian?