Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.

The previous study of the author explores what the participants of the Tiszaeszlár Trials, including Károly Eötvös, Miksa Szabolcsi, József Bary, and Móric Scharf, remembered (and forgot) when they felt that the time has come to reminisce. Continuing in this vein, the present essay traces what “memories” are produced and carried forward by those who do not have their own experiential recollections about the trial. These include traces of memory which found no place in the grand narrative of the case and stayed on the level of local memory and oral transmission. The semantic memory knowledge of the second and third generation who have no episodic memories of their own, has been fully embedded into the procedural memory of the older generation of locals. Beyond analysing family histories hiding in the shadow of “great intellectual discourses”, historians can also explore the output of journalistic or ethnographic data collection projects that deal with local memory.

While the year 1873 had been imprinted into the memory of nearly everyone recording history, another year of crisis forty years later in 1913 left barely any traces in memory. What causes this difference and how can it be interpreted? One reason is the complexity and severity of the events that took place. In addition to the financial crisis in 1873, the last great cholera epidemic also swept across the Monarchy this year. In contrast, the later crisis, triggered in the autumn of 1912 by the Balkan Wars, mainly affected financial and credit markets and industrial and commercial turnovers. It is hard to escape the impression that historical memory is shaped by the perception of crisis at least as much as ‘facts’ and ‘reality’. The study deals with the perception of crises on three levels: contemporary diaries and memoirs, the writings of contemporary economists and retrospective accounts by historians. The personal experiences of three minor characters from 1873 belong in the first category: the study examines the memoirs of Avraham Meir (1830–1907), an Orthodox Jewish merchant and District Officer Péter Krasznay (1830–1916), as well as the diary of the attorney Sámuel Szűcs (1819–1889). It is clear that the short-term crisis perceptions of contemporary witnesses depend partly on their personal disposition and partly on external factors. Sources in the second category show that contemporary academics were not entirely unaffected by this either. The study mentions pioneers of Hungarian crisis research Jakab Pólya (1844–1897), Béla Földes (1848–1945; known as Béla Weisz until 1881) and Sándor Tonelli (1882–1950). Kövér then goes on to review the terminology used by leading figures of twentieth-century Hungarian historiography: Gyula Szekfű (1883–1955) referred to the whole pre-war period as “the age of decline”, and Ferenc Eckhart (1885–1957), the author of the first comprehensive economic history of the modern era, considered the years between 1873–1889 ‘the era of crisis and stagnation’ and 1890–1914 as ‘the heyday of economic development’. In the 1960s, the concept of industrial revolution was reinterpreted. The first GDP calculations for key years (1867, 1900 and 1913) were published by Péter Hanák, Iván T. Berend, György Ránki and László Katus. Katus, using the term ‘take-off’ as a synonym for ‘industrial revolution’, divided the post-1887 period into two phases of growth: one long and ‘very fast’ period (1887–1899) followed by ‘deceleration’ (1900–1913). Kövér concludes his brief history of crisis perception with a review of recent scholarship in macro- and micro-economic history.

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.

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The paper depicts the lives of daughters of the son of the Viennese wholesaler Izsák Figdor, Michael (1790–1830), who deceased at an early age. Common to their fates is that they both finished their unhappy lives in a lunatic asylum. After judicial interdiction had been placed upon her, the older of the two daughters, the spinster Klára (1823-1888) was first placed in a private institution in Vienna and later to the state asylum in Lower Austria. Thee younger daughter, the married Emma (1828–1900) had been an inhabitant of the state asylum in Lipótmező, Buda, and later on lived in the Schwartzer Sanatorium. In Klára’s case we only have information about the interdiction in 1867 from the documents of the Chancery, while in Emma’s case these may be supplemented by a study of the doctors’ records. The documents contain three diagnoses (hysteria; melancholia; lunacy). The paper follows the diagnosis of these illnesses within the framework of the medical discourse of the age with concrete reference to the case of Klára and Emma. During the description of the cases the following dilemmas of interpretation were encountered: is the fate of the individual whose behavior transcends the borders or ‘normalcy’ defined by the micro-society (the family) that regards such deviation as a medical matter or by the institutions removing the marginalized person from his/her original surroundings (the interdiction) or, rather, is it the continuously changing institutionalized system of medical discourse, which not only gives the illness a name, but also provides an opinion on the chances of the cure based on the diagnosis or decides that the case is hopeless and rules that the patient is to be institutionalized and treated? Last, but not least we have also tried to answer the question whether the use of the mental diagnosis and case history increases or decreases the possibilities of biographical work.

A lot has been written about the 1882–1883 Tiszaeszlár-case, nevertheless the overview provided by modern historical studies appears to be rather scanty. The subject of the present study is not as much the trial in Nyíregyháza, but the society of Eszlár on the eve of the trial. Our approach could be defined as one of micro-level social history. As a first step, we shall describe the Jewry of Eszlár on the basis of their own sources and the findings of the investigation. We have established the socio-historical basis for the study using local sources (birth registers, terriers, electoral lists), using the documents of the investigation and the trial to supplement, detail or, if necessary, to animate these. Beside the composition of the population of the village Jewry, its position within the settlement structure of the Old and the New Village, its occupational structure, house and land properties and financial structure, we have also analyzed the internal relationships and conflicts within the branch parish. The sources show a recently settled and conflict-ridden community that had already become differentiated during its formation, where the forces of disintegration appear to be stronger than those of cohesion. The indictment presumed that the “murder” had been committed by vagrant, rather than local Jews, abetted by the Jews of Eszlár and Máramaros. The diachronic socio-historical analysis of the village shows that those Eszlár Jews whose were worse off, had less prestige, were less integrated within the social network and had many conflicts had a better chance of becoming defendants, rather than witnesses in the trial. This, however, does not imply that we intend to postulate a unidirectional causal relationship between society and politics.

Since Adam Smith, the market as a mechanism directed by invisible hands has been a conventional vision in economic thinking. We hardly know anything of the subscribers, the people who hide behind the numbers published in the press (which one cannot regard as more than rough estimations) when new bonds are issued. Undoubtedly, sources that could identify the “invisible subscribing hands,” could only emerge from the archives of the banking houses that constituted the consortium issuing bonds. This paper makes use of three types of sources: firstly, the outgoing correspondence and capital-account books of the London N. M. Rothschild firm transacted around the May 19, 1881 issuing; secondly, the subscription lists found in the dossiers of the Parisian house the Rothschild frères; last but not least, the surviving managerial record books of the Budapest banks (Hungarian General Credit Bank, First Domestic Saving Bank of Pest) that were interested in subscription. The bond issue in 1881 was part of a conversion transaction during which the proprietors of the up to then 6% Hungarian gold rents had the chance to change these for new, 4% Hungarian gold rent bonds. On the other hand, those who formerly did not invest their capital in Hungarian annuity, could, for cash, subscribe the new issuing, too. At the public subscription on May 19, 1881 the 160 million Forint nominal value quantity was 20–25 times oversubscribed. Theoretically, in the case of conversion, taking up loans is unnecessary, since conversion is concerned with the clearing, and renewal of an old investment, and not with a new one. The examination of the 1881 Hungarian gold rent issue shows that gold rent conversion was in reality made up of two parallel transactions, since it provided for both the purchasing of old stocks and the issuing of new ones, in order to make them correspond with each other when accounting towards the state. In the London, Paris and Central-European fields the peculiarities of single markets clearly stand out. The action radius of London and Paris was international. The former reached from Naples to Hamburg, the latter from Barcelona to Bucharest, as if straddling Budapest with its narrow stock market of local interest (and was tightly attached to Vienna anyway because of the exchange rates). The supply and demand for old and new Hungarian rents best achieved equilibrium on the Austrian–German markets, since Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna flexibly cooperated with each other. The Bontoux-crisis bursting out at the beginning of 1882 put an end to the stock-market boom, and the conversion of the Hungarian gold rent could only close at the end of 1884.

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We are familiar with Elemér Balogh's and Simon Krausz' recollections of the class graduating in 1888/89 at the Budapest Business College, although only one of them mentions academic studies explicitly. The academic registers found in the Budapest Archive indicate not only the place and the date of birth, but also the denomination and the current place of residence, along with the father's "civil employment". On the scale of one class, facts concerning the then prevailing employment of parents can be recollected from denominational registers, at least what regards individuals born in Budapest. The certification-books of the academic final examination (graduation) are also available, and their fair copies contain facts of prior schooling. The jubilee memorial volumes of the Business College were published in book-form, that make the former student's "present standing" — that is, the first decades of his career — appear in two different temporal cross-sections (Bricht 1896, Szuppán 1907). My case study, by comparing statistical and narrative sources, inquires into some general questions of the dynamics of intra- and intergenerational mobility research. The study interprets on the example of the 1888/89 student year the opportunities of becoming part of the economic elite.

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