At long last, I have found something truly exciting in Bryan Cartledge’s The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary.[1] It is a historical gem, no less. In a chapter dedicated to the early Nineteenth Century, when the Habsburg empire was recuperating from the Napoleonic Wars, he describes destitute conditions in Hungary, most of which was rural. Having indebted itself too heavily, the nobility was bankrupt. Overburdened with taxes, the peasantry was on its hind legs, too. At the time when many European countries turned to industrialization and urbanization, Hungary was moribund. In 1841, some two-hundred steam engines were operating in Austria while Hungary could boast of only nine.[2] But here comes the clincher. “Under these circumstances of economic stagnation and decline,” Cartledge points out, “Hungary’s growing Jewish population made itself indispensable by filling the rôle that in other countries was filled by the bourgeoisie.”[3] Stupendous. “By 1842,” he continues, “there were 250,000 Jews in Hungary.”[4] Much of the financial support needed came along with their international connections. “Inevitably,” he concludes, “Jewish ubiquity, hard work, and prosperity inspired jealous hostility, particularly among the conservative inhabitants of the towns in which Jews settled, in defiance of the law but largely unhindered; their readiness to assimilate and diligence in learning Magyar nevertheless won them a high degree of tolerance from most of Hungarian society.”[5] Brilliant. All I need to buttress my own history of Zagreb is the arrival of the Hungarian Jews to the Croatian capital a generation or two later. In the late Nineteenth Century, mostly rural Croatia was still destitute of a bourgeoisie, let alone industry. Zagreb was a small medieval town at the time. And the Jews were undoubtedly diligent in learning rudimentary Croatian.

Footnotes

1. London: Hurst & Company, 2011 (first published in 2006).

2. Op. cit., p. 160.

3. Loc. cit.

4. Loc. cit.

5. Op. cit., pp. 160-161.