Sunday, August 30, 2020

Iran's Use of Syria Against Israel



IRAN'S USE OF SYRIA AGAINST ISRAEL

Nadene Goldfoot                                             
 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, also known as Mohammad Reza Shah, was the last Shah of Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979. Due to his status as the last Shah of Iran, he is often known as simply the Shah.  He had been a friend of Israel as had King Cyrus in 538 BCE of Persia.                                         
Ruhollah Khomeini in 1981
former "
 Iranian politician, revolutionary, and cleric
   
Iran keeps her eyes open.  As soon as Syria became independent in 1946,  Iran established a consulate there.  The 2 countries had good relations until the Iranian Revolution of 1979 when the King was deposed and the Ayatollah stepped in.  Syria's president Hafez al-Assad took a 4 day trip to Tehran in 1975 and signed cooperation agreements between the two countries.  It only took a few years more and Assad was supporting Iranian dissidents and started training Iranian guerrillas.  Carter's time ended and Reagan took over in 1981.  
                                                        
rockets found by Israeli navy being smuggled by ship
Syria had a civil war when Iran aided their government in 2011 so they could deal with protesters.  Iran was not prepared to lose this "golden counterweight" to Israel.  

Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, said, "In Syria, the hand of America and Israel is evident.  Wherever a movement is Islamic, poplist and anti-American, we support it."  
Iran's Revolutionary Guard 
                                                   
Iran's army parading 

One major area of cooperation between Iran and Syria was in Lebanon in the Lebanese Civil War.  The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran established and trained the Hebollah terrorists to spread Khomeini's ideology and repel the 1982 Israeli invasion in southern Lebanon.  Hezbollah is both their ammunition against Israel.  Now Iran can influence the Lebanese affairs as well.  In 1982, Ronald Reagan was the USA president.   Today, 8/4/2020, a huge explosion was triggered and the results made Lebanon look like an A bomb scene.  TV first thought fire-crackers went off.  It most likely was an ammunition dump stored at the port with other explosives and went off by itself, ammunition for Iran to use bought by Russia.  
Hezbollah in Lebanon-controlled by Iran
                                               
Haifa is 85 miles from Lebanon
from Metula, Israel, one goes to the "Good Fence" crossing. 
From the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel until 1970, Israel's border with Lebanon was quiet to the point that farmers from the Israeli town of Metula farmed their lands in the Ayoun Valley inside Lebanon. In 1970, after their expulsion from Jordan during Black September, the PLO began taking control over southern Lebanon and violating the tranquility that had prevailed in the area. 
By 2006, Iran and Syria signed agreements against the US and Israel's common threats against them.   

In June 2009 Iran had a disputed presidential election.  US president Obama condemned their crackdown on their opposition, THE GREEN MOVEMENT who were pro-democracy demonstrators.  Obama was elected in 2009.  In 2010 Obama signed expanded sanctions against Iran. This caused their oil exports to be halved.  

"In 2012, Obama, who had previously demanded the resignation of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad, said that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government would be crossing a red line and would entail U.S. military action. After reports on 21 August 2013 about the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, the Obama administration formally blamed the incident on the Syrian government and sought Congressional approval for military action in Syria. Besides, Obama sought support from Britain and France for an attack in Syria. The Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel approved plans for a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes to have those called off by Obama in September. On 11 September 2013 (the first 9/11), Obama put a military strike or combat operations on hold and achieved an agreement with Russia and the Syrian government to destroy all chemical weapons in Syria."  
                                                           
President Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Syria and ISIL, September 29, 2015

"Obama's decision to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished is widely criticised by the U.S. political establishment, as well as the allies, as detrimental to America's international credibility. However, in early 2016, Obama said he was "proud" of his decision, which repudiated what he referred to as the "Washington playbook" and avoided entangling the US in yet another "unfixable" situation in the Middle East.  "The agony of Syria is the biggest moral stain on Barack Obama's presidency. And the chaos rippling from Syria—where many now turn to al-Qaeda, not the West, for salvation—is his greatest geopolitical failure." 
                                                                         
Iranian women in Syria, moving in  
By June 2017, Iran launched missiles into Syria, aiming for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in retaliation for Tehran terror attacks which killed 18 people.  Iran made clear that all foreign military forces like the USA without permission should respect Syria's territorial integrity and leave the country. Donald Trump was then US president.  Like father and son, Iran said that they consider Syria's security its own security, and they consider their own defense capabilities to be those of Syria.  Iran has consistently invested billions of dollars into the Syrian economy.  They make out to be 2 peas in a pod.  
                                                     
President Donald Trump

The Trump administration officially put Iran "on notice" following their ballistic missile tests on January 29, 2017, just days after taking office.  After the late January missile tests by Iran, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on 25 Iranian individuals and entities on February 3, which it said were "initial steps", with Trump's then-National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn adding that ″the days of turning a blind eye to Iran's hostile and belligerent actions toward the United States and the world community are over.                                     
On December 30, 2018 Trump wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Senator Lindsey Graham said that the decision was "a stain on the honor of the United States," and that while he agrees that it's possible to reduce the American footprint in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, the US must keep troops in Syria to ensure ISIL can't regroup. Graham also said that he and a group of generals would urge Trump to reconsider his withdrawal plans during a luncheon later that day.  One week after this announcement, Trump asserted he would not approve any extension of the American deployment in Syria. On January 6, 2019, national security advisor John Bolton added conditions to the pullout,.
America would remain in Syria until ISIL is eradicated and until Turkey guarantees it would not strike America's Kurdish allies.
Again, the policy was not to hurt the Kurds, who were also helpful for Israel.  In October 2019, Trump ordered the Pentagon to withdraw U.S. troops from northeastern Syria to allow Turkey to conduct a planned military operation against Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which had been supporting the U.S. against ISIL since 2014. The sudden announcement on the night of October 6 came after a Trump telephone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. U.S. troops reportedly began withdrawing from some positions in northern Syria on October 7." This was a calamity to both the US and Israel.  No one could understand it.  "Trump defended his withdrawal order, stating that the Kurdish-Turkish conflict "has nothing to do with us" and described the situation as "strategically brilliant" for the U.S."
                                                       
American forces continued their withdrawal from northeastern Syria and Turkey moved into the area formerly controlled by the United States’ Kurdish allies. Fighting has raged in the area for weeks, and forced tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians to flee their homes, according to aid organizations.  They all felt betrayed.  The Kurdish expression “No friends but the mountains” has become more painfully true. The Kurds are the closest matching DNA group of people to Jews that there are; Palestinians are not as close.  Many Kurds live in Israel.  
                                                                    
Iran, Turkey and Russia, now good friends

Things have not always been very good between Iran and Turkey.  In a surprise announcement that marked a noticeable shift in Iran’s regional policy, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif declared Tehran’s “support” for the Turkey-backed “legitimate” Government of National Accord in Libya during a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on June 15, 2020. It was the Iranian government’s first official endorsement of GNA amid claims and rumors that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is surreptitiously transferring arms to forces of the Russian-backed Libyan National Army led by Khalifa Haftar. So Russia is backing the Libyans who also help Iran, and Iran is now supporting Turkey.  

Friday, August 28, 2020

Malta, Sicily; Islands of Refuge from 1492's Spanish Inquisition

Nadene Goldfoot                                             
                                                         
                 
The history of the small Jewish Community of Malta goes back to the arrival of the Semitic Phoenician settlers almost three thousand five hundred years ago. It is believed that they were accompanied by Israelite mariners from the seafaring tribes of Zebulon-6th son of Jacob and Leah, associated with trade;   and Asher-8th son of  Jacob and the 2nd of his concubine, Zilpah; known for his fertile territory from Galilee to Carmel..

The first Jew known from the (New Testament bible)  to have set foot on Malta was Paul of Tarsus, whose ship foundered there in 62 CE. Paul went on to introduce Christianity to the island population.  Paul the Apostle, commonly known as Saint Paul and also known by his Hebrew name Saul of Tarsus, was an apostle who taught the gospel of Christ to the first-century world.  He was born in Tarsus, Turkey.   
 Paul persecuted some of the early disciples of Jesus, possibly Hellenised diaspora Jews converted to Christianity, in the area of Jerusalem prior to his own conversion.

THE DISCOVERY OF A CATACOMB WITH THE SYMBOL OF THE MENORAH ATTESTED THAT JEWS WERE IN MALTA IN ROMAN TIMES. THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A COMMUNITY UNDER ARAB RULE (870-1090) AND IN 1240 THERE WERE 25 JEWISH FAMILIES THERE AND EIGHT IN THE NEIGHBORING ISLAND OF GOZO. DURING THE MIDDLE AGES THE TWO ISLANDS WERE PART OF THE KINGDOM OF SICILY, AND A GREAT DEAL IS KNOWN OF THEIR HISTORY FROM MATERIALS PRESERVED IN THE SICILIAN ARCHIVES. 
                                                                           
Jews were in the Mediterranean islands of Malta and their neighbor island of Gozo  during the Middle Ages:  the period of European history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (5th century) to the fall of Constantinople (1453), or, more narrowly, from c. 1100 to 1453.
                                                     
Mikvah (Ritual Bath) in Sicily
requirement for Jewish Religion

These communities came to an end when Jews were expelled from Sicily, also a Mediterranean Island,  in 1492.  Jews lived in Sicily in the 1st century BCE.  They had an active settlement there in the 6th century, continuing through the 9th and 11th centuries of Arab occupation.  They fared best under Norman rulers.  The population of 40,000 existed at the end of the Middle Ages.  The Inquisition was introduced in 1479.  Sicily was on the list to expulse Jews in 1492. Spain expelled their 180,000 Jews in 1492, so many were searching for other places of refuge.  Sicily's Jewish exile took place by 1497.   Most of the exiles went to the Italian mainland  or the Levant. The kingdom of Naples expelled Jews by 1541.  The surprise to those in power is that they found themselves trying to attract Jewish settlers again in 1745.   They were unsuccessful.   
                                                        

After 1530, the island of Malta was handed over to  the Knights of St. John (The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, commonly known as the Knights Hospitaller, the Knights of Malta, or the Order of Saint John, was a medieval and early modern Catholic military order.) , many Jewish prisoners captured in raids on Turkish shipping and sea-ports were taken to Malta where they were kept until ransomed.

For a long time, a community of slaves with its synagogue and burial-ground,  was organized by the Christian representative of the FRATERNITY FOR RANSOMING PRISONERS, who were in Venice.  

At the close of the 18th century, voluntary immigrants began to establish themselves on Malta, and there was still a small Sephardi community numbering 60 as of 1990.  

Judaism, along with Hinduism, is recognised as a cult but not as a religion in Malta. In 2010, Hindu and Jewish groups urged Pope Benedict XVI to intervene to ensure that Malta treats all religions equally before the law., but the Pope did not intervene. Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, and Rabbi Jonathan B. Freirich, a Jewish leader in California and Nevada in the US, said in a statement in Nevada that he believed the Catholic Church in Malta was not serious about sharing the minority religious viewpoint, and that he was disappointed that they did not want to discuss issues of religious equality with minority religions and denominations.

According to Hebrew University demographer Sergio DellaPergola’s “World Jewish Population, 2016,” Malta is home to between 100 and 300 Jews. Largely of Sephardic origin, the Maltese Jews live in harmony on the island and there has been a recent resurgence in the practice of Jewish life. The Maltese Jewish community is represented by the Jewish Community of Malta (JCM) – the Maltese affiliate of the World Jewish Congress.

Resource:  The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/MT
https://dbs.bh.org.il/place/malta?gclid=Cj0KCQjw1qL6BRCmARIsADV9Jtb8ugv3liiv31exUzCh86Hn-CaHISGoLWhi2pUm7ktN_k0qXTPQjiUaAh27EALw_wcB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Malta
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/malta-virtual-jewish-history-tour

The intertwining of Hungary's History During WWII and the Make-up of George Soros

Nadene Goldfoot
                                                                     
George Schwartz Soros
born August 12, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary
George Soros was born to Tividar and Erzebat Schwartz, non-practicing Jews, in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. Tivadar was an attorney by profession, but the consuming passion of his life was the promotion of Esperanto—an artificial, “universal” language created during the 1880s in hopes that people worldwide might be persuaded to drop their native tongues and speak Esperanto instead—thereby, in theory at least, minimizing their nationalist impulses while advancing intercultural harmony. In 1936, Tivadar changed his family surname to Soros—a future-tense Esperanto verb meaning “will soar.”

Soros has wryly described his home as a Jewish antisemitic home. His mother Erzsébet (also known as Elizabeth) came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro Åœvarc) was a lawyer and a well-known Esperanto-speaker who edited the Esperanto literary magazine Literatura Mondo and raised his son to speak the language. Tivadar had also been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest. The two married in 1924. In 1936, Soros's family changed their name from the German-Jewish Schwartz to Soros, as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because of its meaning. In Hungarian, soros means "next in line," or "designated successor"; in Esperanto it means "will soar."
“I was 14 years old,” he told Steve Kroft. “It was a tremendous evil, a very personal experience of evil.”
But it was an experience for which he felt no guilt, he added, unwittingly seeding smears that would follow him for the next 20 years.
Early in the occupation, Mr Soros worked as a courier for the local Jewish council, which Nazis set up in many occupied countries - using Jews to identify and keep tabs on other Jews."
“The members of the Jewish councils faced impossible moral dilemmas,” the US Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote. "They were often unaware that the Nazis' goal was the death of all Jews, or even believed that working with the regime might benefit their communities."
One day, Mr Soros was ordered to deliver messages to several Jewish lawyers in Budapest, according to the biography, Mr Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. The letters instructed the lawyers to report to a rabbinical school, but Mr Soros realised they would be imprisoned upon arrival. He warned them of their danger, according to the book, and quit his job with the council after carrying out the errand."
George Soros, Hon FBA is a Hungarian-American billionaire investor and philanthropist. As of May 2020, he had a net worth of $8.3 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations.  Open Society Foundations, formerly the Open Society Institute, is an international grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media.  Their headquarters is in New York.
In the United States, the Open Society Foundations work with organizations and individuals who seek to address profound racial, economic, and political inequalities, while funding efforts to prepare for the policy challenges of the future. 
                                                  
People hold hands as a sign of unity during a rally in front of Baltimore City Hall in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 3, 2015. © Andrew Burton/Getty
Daytime, blue sky, now...all is well as it should be

     George Soros’s giving in the United States began in the 1980s with a focus on just two issues—improving the quality of palliative care, and reforming punitive drug policies that largely targeted Black Americans. During the 1990s, our racial justice work broadened to fight bias in schools, in policing, in voting, and in the justice system, while we expanded support for those advocating for greater levels of government accountability and the protection of civil and political rights for all.
                                                         
When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, Tivadar decided to split up his family so as to minimize the chance that all its members would be killed together. For each of them—his wife and two sons—he purchased forged papers identifying them as Christians; paid government officials to conceal his family’s Jewish heritage from the German and Hungarian fascists; and bribed Gentile families to take them into their homes. As for George in particular, the father paid a Hungarian government official named Baumbach to claim George as his Christian godson, “Sandor Kiss,” and to let the boy live with him in Budapest. 
One of Baumbach’s duties was to deliver deportation notices to Hungary’s Jews, confiscating their property and turning it over to Germany. Young George Soros sometimes accompanied the official on his rounds.14 Many years later, in December 1998, a CBS interviewer would ask Soros whether he had ever felt any guilt about his association with Baumbach during that period. Soros replied: “… I was only a spectator … I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”15

In fact, Kaufman wrote in the biography, Mr Soros would spend years in therapy “dealing with the impact that his temporary, necessary, and pragmatic denial of Jewishness at the age of fourteen had had on the development of his personality.”
Soros today recalls the German occupation of Hungary as “probably the happiest year of my life.” “For me,” he elaborates, “it was a very positive experience. It’s a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you’re fourteen years old and you don’t believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It’s a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”16
In 1947 the Soros family relocated from Hungary to England, where George attended the London School of Economics (LSE). There, he was exposed to the works of the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper, who taught at LSE and whom Soros would later call his “spiritual mentor.”17 Though Soros never studied directly under Popper, he read the latter’s works and submitted some essays to him for review and comment. Most notably, Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies introduced Soros to the concept of an “open society,” a theme that would play a central role in Soros’s thought and activities for the rest of his life.18  Resource: https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/george-soros/
"When asked about what he thought about Israel, in The New Yorker, Soros replied: "I don't deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don't want anything to do with it." According to hacked emails released in 2016, Soros's Open Society Foundation has a self-described objective of "challenging Israel's racist and anti-democratic policies" in international forums, in part by questioning Israel's reputation as a democracy. He has funded NGOs which have been actively critical of Israeli policies including groups that campaign for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
Speaking before a 2003 conference of the Jewish Funders Network, Soros said that the administrations of George W. Bush in the U.S. and Ariel Sharon in Israel, and even the unintended consequences of some of his own actions, were partially contributing to a new European antisemitism. Soros, citing accusations that he was one of the "Jewish financiers" who, in antisemitic terms, "ruled the world by proxy", suggested that if we change the direction of those policies, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League later said that Soros's comments held a simplistic view, were counterproductive, biased and a bigoted perception of what's out there, and "blamed the victim" when holding Jews responsible for antisemitism. 
Jewish philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, who arranged for Soros's appearance at the conference, clarified, "George Soros does not think Jews should be hated any more than they deserve to be." Soros has also said that Jews can overcome antisemitism by "giv[ing] up on the tribalness".In a subsequent article for The New York Review of Books, Soros emphasized that  I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel and I am not blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism predates the birth of Israel. Neither Israel's policies nor the critics of those policies should be held responsible for anti-Semitism. At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel's policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby's success in suppressing divergent views.
In 2017, Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz filed a $10 million lawsuit against Soros, alleging that Soros had influenced the government of Guinea to freeze Steinmetz's company BSG Resources out of iron ore mining contracts in the African country due to "long-standing animus toward the state of Israel". Steinmetz claims that Soros engaged in a "smear" campaign against him and his companies and blames Soros for scrutiny of him by American, Israeli, Swiss, and Guinean authorities. Soros called Steinmetz's suit "frivolous and entirely false" and said that it was "a desperate PR stunt meant to deflect attention from BSGR's mounting legal problems across multiple jurisdictions".
During an award ceremony for Imre Kertész, Soros said that the victims of violence and abuse were becoming "perpetrators of violence", suggesting that this model explained Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians, which led to walkouts and Soros being booed.
In July 2017, a Hungarian billboard campaign backed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which was considered to be anti-semitic by the country's Jewish groups, vilified Soros as an enemy of the state, using the slogan "Let's not allow Soros to have the last laugh". The campaign was estimated to have cost 5.7bn forints (then US$21 million). According to the Israeli ambassador the campaign "evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear", a reference to Hungary's role in the deportation of 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Lydia Gall of Human Rights Watch asserted that it was reminiscent of Nazi posters during the Second World War featuring "'the laughing Jew'". Orbán and his government's representative said they had a "zero tolerance" of antisemitism, explaining the posters were aiming to persuade voters Soros was a "national security risk".
Hours later, in an apparent attempt to ally Israel with Hungary, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a "clarification", denouncing Soros, stating that he "continuously undermines Israel's democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself".
Soros' son Alexander said in an interview that his father cares about Israel, and that he "would like to see Israel in Yitzhak Rabin's image. His views are more or less the common views in Meretz and in the Labor Party." According to Alexander, Soros supports a two-state solution. The younger Soros recounts that after his bar mitzvah in 1998, his father told him: "If you're serious about being Jewish, you might want to consider immigrating to Israel."

My opinion is that if Soros had ever studied our history like he has the financing in the world, he would have very different opinions about his Jewish background.  It's out of his own family's anti-Semitic attitude that has shaped his mind about his own people, that and falling into the quagmire of believing the German propaganda around him in his early years about Jews.  Our worst enemies are often a few of our own gullible people, and he's such an example, for he has been often said to be one of the financiers of J Street, the group against AIPAC, finding fault and siding with those who are against Israel and oftentimes, Orthodox Jewry.  
                                                         
Europe 1200 

Jews in Hungary go back to the 2nd century CE with graves dating from then.  Jewish communities were known to be in Hungary in the 9th century.  By the 13th century, the decrees of the Catholic Lateran Council segregating the Jews from their neighbors were pit into effect and the wearing of a distinctive bade was started.  During the reign of Bela IV from 1235 to 1270, many Jews settled in Hungary as his property.  They enjoyed good relations with their neighbors, and were often minters of coins, some of which bore Hebrew inscriptions.  Despite pressure from the Pope, the position of the Jews remained good until 1349 when they were expelled for the first time.  A 2nd expulsion took place in 1360.  Many Jews immigrated from the neighboring countries when the edict was revoked in 1364.  A year later the office of "judge of the Jews" was established to collect taxes from the Jewish population and protect their interests, the last judge was appointed in 1440.

The 15th and 16th centuries were marked by recurrent charges of Ritual Murder and the cancellation of debts owned to Jews.  For nearly a century and a half until 1686, the Jews of Buda and southern Hungary enjoyed a large measure of civic equality and religious liberty under the occupying Ottoman Empire regime, although subject to heavy taxes as 2nd rate citizens or dhimmis.   The restoration of Hungarian sovereignty brought in its wake, expulsions and exclusion of Jews from agriculture and the professions.  At the same time, some nobles protected the Jews whose number were augmented by refugees from Vienna in 1670. 


The arrival of Jews from Moravia and Poland in the first half of the 18th century further increased the Jewish population.  The Polish immigrants brought the study of the Talmud to Hungry, establishing important centers of learning. 
                                                                  
Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina was the only female ruler of the Habsburg dominions and the last of the House of Habsburg. She was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, and Parma.
During Maria Theresa's reign, various new methods were devised for exacting money from the Jews.  
                                                                         
The rule of Joseph II from 1780 to 1790 brought the right to establish schools, lease lands, engage in all trades and professions, and live in the royal cities.  The Jewish badge was abolished, and the Jews had to adopt German surnames.  All this was nullified at Joseph's death.  Joseph was one of fifteen children born to Leopold II and Maria Louisa of Spain. He was born in Florence, where his father was ruling as Grand Duke of Tuscany.  In 1796, he was made Palatine of Hungary (nádor in Hungarian). This old title was, in effect, a deputy of the king, when he was absent from the country.

Then they had a struggle for past rights that everyone else had and had to deal with increased Magyarization of the Jewish community.  Wholehearted support for the 1848 revolution brought severe reprisals by the Austrians.  In 1867 the Jews were finally granted full civic and political rights.  Afterward, Hungarian Jewry became divided in its religious life into 2 opposing  camps of orthodox and liberal Jews.  


The rise of anti-Semitism was going on in the 19th century which mirrored the rapid integration of the Jews into the country's life.  This culminated in the Tiszaeszar Ritual Murder libel.  The Tiszaeszlár Affair was a blood libel which led to a trial that set off anti-semitic agitation in Austria-Hungary in 1882 and 1883. After the disappearance of a local girl, Eszter Solymosi, Jews were accused of ritually murdering and beheading her. After her body was found some time later in a river, she having apparently drowned, it was claimed that the body was not that of Eszter, but had been dressed in her clothes. A lengthy trial followed, eventually resulting in the acquittal of all the accused.

Jews were in the middle of the cultural life of Hungary before WWI.  They participated in the Communist Revolution of 1919 and suffered more after the collapse of the Bela Kun regime, and discrimination of many kinds was instituted against them.  

After the advent of Nazism in Germany, the scope of anti-Jewish measures enacted b the government increased.  These also applied to the 300,000 Jews in territories which the Hungarians annexed from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania during WWII.  


In 1944, the Nazis overran Hungary, imposed ghettos, concentration camps, and deportations to extermination centers.  Of Hungary's 725,000 Jews, about 400,000 were killed.  After the liberation, all pre-war organizations were re-established.  

The communists in 1948 gained power led to the nationalization of Jewish institutions, and religious organizations wee centralized under one authority.  Some 20,000 Jews left the country after the 1956 revolution.  80,000 Jews were registered in the country in 1990.  




Discover the networks is an online database of th