„Nemesi társadalom" Tiszaeszláron a jobbágyfelszabadítás után

Absztrakt

About a month after the case of the disappearance of Eszter Solymosi from Tiszaeszlár on 1st April 1882 a murder investigation was launched that led to a trial in Nyíregyháza a year later. The first part of this paper attempts to examine the social formations of the Eszlár and neighboring Jewry who became defendants (and witnesses) in this trial. Changing my viewpoint this time I shall try to depict the group formations of the major personalities at the opposite pole of the conflict. To start with I shall contract the feudal thought patterns of the prosecutor general and the attorneys of the defense with the tradition of historiography and social science that was used by later generation to depict the fi nal days and aftermaths of feudal society (from Gyula Szekfű to Péter Hanák). The main body of the research is based on the sources available to describe the society of Tiszaeszlár (birth certifi cates, tax and land registers, electoral rolls, etc.). To provide a more in-depth analysis of „feudal society” I shall narrow down my viewpoint from the entire society of Tiszaeszlár to the case study of a single clan, the Farkas family. Finally I shall apply the working hypothesis in the original context: can a model of social structure that has proved itself irrelevant from the structural point of view be reformulated in the light of the actions during the trial (interviews, mobilization, etc.). Did the trial itself have a formative effect on the local thought about social groups, did it aff ect group formation? In the space between the solidarity of family and kin and the administrative/court investigation, did certain lines of force emerge that may be interpreted as „feudal”? I have found no such. Thus the hypothesis of the persistence of a „feudal society” beyond the fall of feudalism in the legal and historical sense is one that is not supported by the Tiszaeszlár facts.