THE TRANSYLVANIAN JEWISH IDENTITY’S AVATARS IN THE EPOCH OF EMANCIPATION
THE TRANSYLVANIAN JEWISH IDENTITY’S AVATARS IN THE EPOCH OF EMANCIPATION

Summary/Abstract: The Transylvanian Jewish Identity’s Avatars in the Epoch of Emancipation. The result of the Jewish identity’s evolutions in the 18th–19th centuries was a rupture of the Jewish society from Hungary, including Transylvania, between a so-called neologist or congressional orientation, and an orthodox orientation, respectively, which strictly respects tradition and maintains communital autonomy. Between the two options, the one of the so-called status-quo ante communities also inserts itself, these communities remaining on the grounds of the organisation system anterior to the rupture, with a combination of traditionalist elements with moderate renewal tendencies. Certain specific aspects are added to this general picture by the existence of the Hasidic communities, which represented a popular mysticism, also opaque to the modernising alienation from tradition, as well as by the Sephardic communities, representatives of an orthodoxy attached to a tradition with its considerable particular traits in cultic practice.

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