JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN THE SĂLAJ AREA: MODERNIZATION, INSTITUTIONS, AND RUPTURES (19TH CENTURY–MID-20TH CENTURY)
JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN THE SĂLAJ AREA: MODERNIZATION, INSTITUTIONS, AND RUPTURES (19TH CENTURY–MID-20TH CENTURY)

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the modernization of Jewish communities in the Sălaj (Szilágy) area from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, focusing on education, cultural institutions, printing houses, and the interwar press. It argues that legal emancipation and integration into a market economy enabled the consolidation of a dense communal infrastructure—confessional elementary schools (izraelita népiskola), synagogues, charitable societies (Hevra Kadisha, Bikur Holim), reading circles, libraries, and multilingual publications in Hungarian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Education functioned both as an instrument of social mobility and as a space of identity negotiation, balancing civic loyalty, linguistic adaptation, religious continuity, and, in the early twentieth century, emerging Zionist initiatives. The study also reconstructs the local printing landscape under changing press regulations and administrative controls after 1918, highlighting how provincial typographies supported linguistic pluralism and community life, yet remained highly vulnerable to political shocks. Finally, a discourse-oriented reading of interwar provincial newspapers demonstrates how antisemitic narratives were normalized through moralizing, economic stereotyping, and pamphlet satire, transforming exclusion into routine cultural language. The rupture of 1944 is interpreted not only as demographic catastrophe but as the destruction of an entire institutional ecosystem whose traces survive fragmentarily in memorial books, local chronicles, and archival records.

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