The entrance of Jews into Hungarian society in Vor1narz: the case of the 'Casinos' MICHAEL K. SILBER In the last twenty years, the theme of Jewish social integration has been the focus of several social histories on the Jews of Germany and Western Europe. 1 The most thorough has been Jacob Katz's pioneering study on the complex relations between Jews and Freemasons from the inception of the first masonic lodges in the eighteenth century down to Hitler's Germany. Katz based his account on a wealth of material, the most important being previously inaccessible masonic archives. In this case-study of the 'neutral society', a concept he introduced elsewhere, Katz chronicled in depth the shifting fortunes of Jews in their quest for social acceptance in Western Europe and in particular in Germany. 2 Was the social integration of the Jews in the different European countries more or less a uniform process or was it influenced by the varying structures and values of the host societies? Hungary is an interesting testing ground, for while Hungarian Jewry shared many of the features of German Jewry, the two host societies were quite different from each other. It would have been convenient to compar!'! Jewish social integration in the two countries had there been masonic lodges in Hungary; the Freemasons, however, were banned in the Habsburg realms throughout most of the nineteenth century. 3 There did exist, however, an analogous 'neutral society' in Hungary whose history may provide the answers we seek- the social clubs, the so-called 'casinos'. There is enoughprimafacie evidence thatJews were indeed received into the casinos as early as the pre-1848 period to warrant a more detailed investigation. 4 There are several methodological problems in researching the entrance of Jews into the casinos. Unlike the masonic lodges, the casinos were not centrally organized and therefore never generated The entrance of Jews into Hungarian society the documentation that the Freemasons did, nor did they succeed in preserving more than a fraction of their archives. 5 Therefore, our historical reconstruction of the social integration of Jews into Hungarian society will of necessity be patchy; nevertheless, the broad contours of the process seem to be clear. Although the·focus of this paper will be the Vormiirz period, that is, the generation before the 1848 revolutions, it will prove nevertheless instructive first to cast a glance at the state ofHungarianJ ewry at the turn of the nineteenth century. The received wisdom about the nature and extent ofJewish assimilation in Hungary has been. largely fashioned by the history of the fin de siecle, a fact which has unfortunately exercised an undue influence upon assessment of other periods. A brief survey of the turn of the century can serve as a convenient yardstick against which to measure the history of Jewish integration in Vormiirz. Assimilation in fin-de-siecle Hungary Located on the periphery of Central Europe, Hungarian Jewry was a latecomer to modernization. Nevertheless, by the First World War, the Jews of Hungary and especially of Budapest had earned a reputation as one of the most assimilated Jewries on the continent. During the previous fifty years, they had enthusiastically adopted the Magyar language - most impressively, even broad segments of Orthodox Jewry were now speaking Magyar- and the Magyariz- ation of family and personal names was fashionable. Many had passionately embraced Hungarian nationalism, while conversely only a handful to the Zionist ideology preached by the Budapest-born Herzl. But what did this assimilation entail? In the last three decades our conceptions of the process have become increasingly refined; different elements of assimilation have been analytically identified and some have been shown to be largely independent of the others. Thus, while recognizing that the majority of Jews in the modern period opted to discard traditional Jewish culture and have undergone extensive acculturation, Jewish historians have also argued that acculturation did not necessarily lead to more advanced stages of assimilation (although these advanced stages were clearly predicated upon acculturation). 6 Acculturation of many European Jewries was sel- dom accompanied or followed by 'structural assimilation', that is by some form of social intercourse which transcended the formal and segmented nature of traditional Jewish-gentile relations. On the