ABSTRACT
Historian Peter Kenez wrote that “modern antisemitism was different from the medieval variety” in that it assumed the existence of an essential and insidious Jewish nature that even conversion and assimilation could not alter or render harmless, but merely rendered invisible and therefore all the more dangerous. The fear of disappearing was partly a fear of being assimilated into other nationalities, and partly a fear that other nationalities were not fully assimilating, even when they appeared to be. One of the common tropes of Hungarian antisemitism has been a distinction between “assimilated” and “Eastern” Jews who immigrated to the Kingdom of Hungary from Galicia. When in 1882 a teenage girl disappeared in the town of Tiszaeszlár, local politicians agitated for the expulsion of Jews from Galicia. With the Treaty of Trianon at the war’s end, the Hungarian Kingdom lost two-thirds of its territory, much of it to Romania and the new state of Czechoslovakia.
