B. gazda és H. doktor (Kisvárosi önéletírások felekezeti mintázatai)
Farmer B. and Doctor H. The Denominational Patterns of Small Town Autobiographies

Summary/Abstract: This study examines the autobiographical creation of denominational relations in the framework of definitional differentiation between integration and assimilation, comparing the memoirs of a Jewish agricultural intellectual of nation-wide fame and a Christian law-yer, both from Gyöngyös and both relating the story of their youth. In both auto-biographies the modern Hungarian society shows an integrating but not assimilated pic-ture. The study analyses how lifestyles, systems of values, the problems of connubium and comensality, namely class-based behavioural sociological separation and maintaining rela-tions between denominations are presented in the two autobiographies; it tries to prove that in a small town in the first half of the 20th century there were no barriers between Jews and Christians, or if there were they were not where they are traditionally supposed to have been. The second part of my work concentrates on the fact that the autobiograph-ers still considered it important whether they were Jews or not; what is more, the society they created in their autobiographies also found it important. Finally, the study hints at the fact that the simultaneous presence of integration and the lack of assimilation were the prerequisites for the development of large scale social inequalities between Jews and Christians.

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