Within a few generations, Jews came to occupy a central position in the country’s economy by the turn of the twentieth century, they began to play a key role in the cultural world, and briefly before the dissolution of the monarchy, in the politics of Hungary. In the last third of the nineteenth century, a significant proportion of Hungarian Jewry, including even sectors of Orthodoxy, fervently assimilated the Magyar language and culture, and passionately identified with Hungarian nationalism. In time, Hungary became the arena of an acute religious conflict between Orthodoxy and the local variant of Reform- Neolog-unmatched in intensity elsewhere. It was the product of two waves of migration of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe who retained their distinctive dispositions. This was all the more striking because of the community’s internal diversity. It was a young Jewry, composed of a few thousand persons at the beginning of the eighteenth century however, 200 years later it had developed a unique, recognizable character. Hungary, the most diverse national and religious state in Europe, became home to the second-largest Jewish population on the continent, numbering almost a million on the eve of World War I. The Jewish Community after the Fall of Communism.
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