ABSTRACT
The situation of the Jewish expellees was possibly even more precarious, partly because there seemed to be a lack of outward identification of these people as Jews. The complex interplay between the fate of the railway car dwellers, the Galician refugees, and the new poor of the Hungarian middle class shows the challenges this situation created for the Jewish communities in Budapest, as well as for the idea of Hungarian Jewish identity as such. In order to understand the ambivalences that the Budapest Jewish community felt towards the expellees, one has to realize that this community felt as if it was under attack itself. Reports of violence against Jews in Hungary reached the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which, in April 1920, sent their director general, Julius Goldman, to Budapest to assess the need for humanitarian aid.
