ABSTRACT
The real ability of fascism to assume an antiestablishment, even a revolutionary, role is well illustrated by the less familiar fascist parties of Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In the social systems of post-World War I Hungary and Rumania, an educated, quasi-modernized class ruled over a quite backward mass of peasants and a smaller number of workers—with the aid of an energetic police force. World War I was very hard on Hungary. It was sundered from its long union with Austria, stripped of two-thirds of its former territories, and reduced to the status of a third-rate power. Nationalism and social reform were the key elements of the Eastern European fascist formula, and a rabid anti-Semitism was the link between the two. The relationship between Central and Eastern European Jewry and the dominant groups in their respective societies was a long and complicated one.
