Identitatea evreilor ardeleni în perioada interbelică
The Identity of Transylvanian Jews in the Interwar Period

Summary/Abstract: The core of my work refers to the controversy surrounding the “path of the Jews”, as it appeared in the pages of Hungarian and Jewish publications in Transylvania, in 1927. It was in 1924, after the general assembly of the Hungarian National Party in Romania (Országos Magyar Párt) in Brașov, that the People’s Literary Society (Népies Irodalmi Társaság) in Budapest, in charge of managing the tacit funding of the institutions of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, pointed out to the Hungarian Prime Minister, István Bethlen, that Transylvanian Jewry would separate from ethnic Hungarians in a not so distant future. Based on the speeches and disputes within the General Assembly and taking into account the events which took place in Romania/Transylvania after 1918, the Népies Irodalmi Társaság anticipated these alternatives: the Transylvanian Jewry would either be assimilated by the Romanians, or they would become a minority of their own. Three years later, in 1927, these issues were once again put into the spotlight, having been discussed in the circles of Transylvanian Jews. The dispute was triggered by an article written by a Jewish Hungarian lawyer living in Timișoara and published in the Temesvarer Zeitung Germanlanguage newspaper. He concluded that the Transylvanian Hungarian Jewry would gradually separate from the Hungarian minority, only to be assimilated by the Romanians. In the following pages, I will describe the main elements of the controversy, as it appeared in 1927, and I will also try to provide an interpretation of the formation/transformation of the system of relations between Hungarians and Jews after 1918.

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