Hungarian Conservative

Gábor Deutsch, the staunchly anti-communist Chief Rabbi of Devecser, wrote a study on Judaism and Bolshevism published in 1937 in which his aim was ‘to prove, point by point, that the classical revelations of the Jewish religious ethos, the Scriptures and the Talmud are opposed sharply to the basic doctrines of Bolshevism’. On 4 July 1944 he was transported to Auschwitz, from where he never returned.

‘The notion of ‘Judeo-Christian’, putting aside its religious connotation, as the foundation of Western civility is rather arbitrary, if not ambiguous. Various Christian fundamentalists and self-proclaimed traditional Catholics have employed the ‘Judeo-Christian’ discourse to justify their backing of Israel, despite the term being neither eschatological nor doctrinal. ’

‘Christians no longer live by their own standards but by Christ’s, and since Jesus did not abolish the Law, the divine standards of morality, and therefore of sexuality, do not change with time or the spirit of the age.’

The anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews demonstrating in New York are therefore not necessarily a curiosity. They are representatives of an old and historically legitimate school of thought, albeit completely marginalized and despised in their own religious milieu as well. Their presence simply demonstrates that Judaism is diverse, that there are all kinds of trends within it, and that it is not possible to treat this community as a single monolith.

‘Looking at the stories, or the food, rituals and traditions surrounding them, Passover and Easter couldn’t be more different at first sight. But if we look closely, we can see that Passover and Easter are intimately linked on many levels.’

Even though The Innocence of Pontius Pilate by David Lloyd Dusenbury offers no mystic resolution of Pilate’s drama, the philosophical conclusions it draws from the trial of Jesus are indeed far-reaching.

The research conducted by the Danube Institute contradicts the image of an anti-Semitic Hungary painted by many Western mainstream media outlets. Thanks to the government’s zero tolerance policy, public anti-Semitic expressions are no longer tolerated and Jewish people can freely walk in the streets and worship in synagogues without having to rely on heavy security presence.

According to the sources reviewed, it is evident that Jewish communities were subjected to the same extent of plundering by the short-lived Communist regime in 1919 as the Christian churches.

‘The moment you are not criticizing Israel but demonizing it, using double standards against it, or delegitimizing it, it is not simply being critical of Israel and Zionism at large, but being an anti-Semite.’