Budapest trip report

[lethargic_man]

Last Thursday I headed off to Hungary for a UK/Czech/Hungarian Marom seminar in Budapest.

It was my first time in Budapest, and, as previously in Prague and Berlin, I went out early and came back late to do some sightseeing.

I spent the morning of my first day in the Hungarian National Museum, in Buda Castle. The Museum consists of five floors, plus, as I later discovered, a warren of basement corridors (including parts of transplanted mediaeval castle) going right the way down through the hill the castle's built on. (There's a road tunnel going straight through the base of the hill too, so that, Eva, our tour guide, explained, when it rains they can push the Chain Bridge into it so it doesn't get wet.) The top floor dealt with the prehistoric period, and featured bones and teeth from such animals as mammoth, woolly rhino, cave lion and cave bear, as well as less exotic (and less extinct) megafauna such as deer and wild horses.

Modern-day Budapest was only united in the nineteenth century; previously it was two cities, Buda (and Óbuda, or Old Buda) on the hilly west side of the Danube, and Pest, on the flat east side. The Danube was first bridged only in the nineteenth century; in Roman times, I learned, it was the border of the Roman Empire, which gave me a sense of crossing the frontier every time I crossed the river after that. :o)

My first sight of the Danube* was disappointing; it didn't make me want to go away and dock with rotating space stations. I was impressed, however, by the slabs of ice floating at walking pace downriver. (The temperature when I arrived was oscillating around freezing point—it was an unusual sight for me to see snow piled up on the sides of roads that had perhaps been there all winter—but it warmed up halfway through and started melting in earnest.)

* A trivium about the name "Danube": it derives from an Iranian word meaning river. You can see the same stem in river names around the Black Sea—Danube, Don, Donetz, Dnieper, Dniestr—once upon a time Iranian tribes lived in Romania! The word may go back to Proto-Indo-European, as the same word also occurs in Celtic languages, e.g. the River Don on which Doncaster stands, and the River Don on which Aberdeen (formerly Aberdon) stands.

The museum described the Ottoman occupation of Hungary as a terrible thing: the city was sacked and burned, and its inhabitants carried off into slavery. Once again, this was something I got a different perspective from on the seminar. Under the Christians the Jews were persecuted and periodically expelled from the city; under the Turks, they were free from persecution. When the Holy League fought to take back the city for Christendom, the Jews fought against them on the Turkish side. Sadly, because the Turks lost this meant the Jews came in for more persecution, for having done so.

On Monday, after the seminar, I did some more tourism, including visiting the Parliament, which was very sumptuous except for the Crown Jewels, which are not. I was more impressed when I learned their age; the orb, for example, was a gift to the Hungarians from the Byzantine Emperor. Wow! (I don't think I've seen any non-building Byzantine relics beforehand; certainly not ones that are still in use.)

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The seminar included a tour of Jewish Budapest. In the early nineteenth century, a group of Jews, disillusioned with Orthodoxy's ghetto mentality, founded a reform movement called Neolog (New Idea). Compared with the Reform movement emerging in Germany at the time, Neolog was incredibly conservative; however, it was enough to cause a break with the Orthodox, which moved to the right in reaction. As a result, a third group came into being, calling themselves Status Quo, claiming to represent Orthodoxy as it had been before the rise of Neolog.

(The seminar was originally going to focus on the rise of ultra-Orthodoxy, which came originally from Hungary; sadly, insufficient people signed up for the seminar to allow Marom to bring Rabbi Chaim Weiner, who would have been the speaker on this issue. This was a bit of a disappointment from my perspective.)

Neolog today seems, at a first glance, still to be more-or-less where it was in the early nineteenth century. This struck me as odd, given the history in the Reform movement of moving gradually back to the right since, and in the Masorti/Conservative Judaism of moving gradually leftwards, but maybe I don't know enough about its history. At any rate, their Shabbos service was identical to the Orthodox, with the following exceptions: First, there was no mechitza, though there was segregated seating. (A minority of Masorti/Conservative shuls practise this too.) Secondly, there was a mixed choir—even though women played no other active part in the service. And thirdly—and most strangely to me, as in the UK, and to the best of my limited knowledge, everywhere else, this is a factor that separates the Reform movement from Masorti—there was an organ. (I've since learned, from Roni's trip report, that the organ was played by a non-Jew.)

I've not been to a Reform service with an organ beforehand; I don't know where it's used. In the Neolog service in the Heroes' Synagogue, they did not start using it until אין כמוך, despite a large amount of chazonus [cantorial singing] during the repetition of the Amida and especially (of course) the Kedusha.

The Hebrew speakers amongst my readership will have spotted that I used the word "chazonus", not "chazanut" in the paragraph above. I'm so used to being alone in my use of the Ashkenazi pronunciation (outside of the Charedi world) that I was taken by surprise at finding myself in an Ashkenazi-speaking congregation. They didn't pronounce their Hebrew exactly the way I do, though: they pronounced חולם /oy/, whereas I pronounce it /au/ (a pronunciation someone once told me was Yekishe).

(The Hungarians didn't get to hear my pronunciation, because my hangup about admitting to being a Cohen kicked in, and when the gabbai asked us (in Modern Hebrew, unexpectedly for an old man) when we came in whether any of us was Cohen, Levi or Israel, I said nothing... and then found myself unable to let myself be called up once I'd missed the missed the first aliyah. This is annoying; it's one thing not to admit to being a Cohen when it would mean being deferred to without just cause (i.e. the cause being that my ancestors served in the Temple two thousand years ago); it's quite another when it would actually have come in useful for ritual purposes. Anyhow, never mind.)

The choir was out of sight in the chancel. The only shul I've ever come across before where this was done—not only hiding the choir away from sight, but also the only other shul I've ever seen with a chancel—is the Orthodox one in Edinburgh (and even then, they only have a choir on High Holydays). I found the whole thing quite bizarre. The presence of a chancel, and a parochet parauches paroyches^* is must surely have been copied from churches. And yet, as livredor pointed out to me, the version of these in churches was based on the model of the Hebrew Temple.

* Terminology makes all the difference. "Davening", or "gabbai", for example, convey quite different connotations, to "praying" and "beadle". Whilst I could just about get away with saying "chancel" in English, there's no way I could say "rood screen"!

The chazonus was precisely of the kind that people flocked to shul to hear in the early twentieth century, and is badly out of fashion nowadays. I don't want to go to shul to sit and listen to highly ornamented, almost operatic, singing; I want to join in. And the Neolog service involved pretty much no participation whatsoever. Yet, strangely enough, I recognised many of the tunes they used. Even though this was a foreign form of Judaism to mine (which largely derives from Poland), and had been locked away behind the Iron Curtain for forty years, there was still a substantial overlap of tunes.

I had been under the impression beforehand that there was a large and flourishing Jewish community in Hungary. There are a hundred thousand Jews there, and at the seminar in Berlin last year, the Hungarian contingent was the biggest. Yet it turned out that of those hundred thousand, only five or six thousand were active even to the extent of going to shul once a year. At our Friday night event in Budapest, the Hungarian Marom members only turned up after the service, and none of them came to shul on Shabbos morning.

Frankly, I'm not surprised. The service would have been a big put-off. There was nothing to draw anyone in who did not have the inner need to go there anyway; and there was no participation. During the leyning there were no chumashim available, so people just sat and talked. (Though to be honest, the acoustics were so bad I couldn't even tell when each piece of leyning finished and the ברכות afterwards started.) There was a grand total in shul of one girl in her twenties, and one parent with a child; the rest of the congregation were old men and women.

I had a look at the Wikipedia page for Neolog prior to writing this trip report, and it was all written in the past tense: "Neolog was a reform movement in Hungarian Judaism," and so forth. I responded by editing it into the present tense, but unless the community gets its act together, it could end up dead in a generation from the point of view of practising religion. I'd like to hope the some of the Hungarian Marom members were positively affected by the participatory Carlebach Friday night service with lots of beautiful singing and harmonisation* they experienced in the seminar in Berlin, but that by itself won't, of course, be enough.

(A contrast could be drawn with the new Masorti community in Portugal, consisting of Bnei Anusim (Crypto-Jews) who have rejoined the Jewish community after five hundred years of maintaining ever fewer practices in secret. I had the privilege to meet some of them in Berlin, and have since learned of how they are taking with eagerness to learning Jewish practice. Indeed, Lisbon is a possibility for a future Marom Olami European seminar.)

After the service there was a Tu Bishvat kiddush, in which the nineteenth century attitude continued to be manifest: the kiddush was seated, but with men and women segregated... and the shul machers on a long table by themselves at the front. Nobody spoke to us in English, and we didn't get to mingle at all (though opportunities were limited, as we were seated).

The Neolog synagogue on Dohány Street (meaning Tobacco Street, due to the factories that had been there) is a colossal building, sumptuously built in the Moorish style (rather like it's even more sumptuous roughly-contemporary, the not-in-the-slightest Sephardi Spanish Synagogue in Prague). The synagogue was Herzl's native shul (though he did not have good memories of it at all).

When built, it was the largest synagogue in the world; even today, it's only been overtaken by Temple Emmanu-El in New York. It's still in use today, but not during the winter: it costs too much to heat. Instead, services take place in the next-door Heroes Synagogue. After the First World War, in gratitude to the Jews that had fought for Hungary (and in compensation for contemporary pogroms), the government gave money to the Jews to build a memorial for their war dead; the Jews chose to spend the money not on a memorial, but on a place of worship. Hence, the Heroes Synagogue.

* One amusing moment during the trip occurred when I was humming a niggun in the shower in the youth hostel where we were staying, and someone started harmonising to it! Embarrassed, I broke off, then said, "Joseph, is that you?" "Yes." "I think I've just given myself away, haven't I!" :o) It was a somewhat surreal situation.

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The phrase book I bought before I set out, printed in 2003, warned that vegetarians might have a hard time, as Hungarians ate everything with meat; however, during the time we were there, we ate at one vegetarian and one vegan restaurant, so that wasn't a problem. On Thursday night, before the seminar began, I decided to have some Hungarian cuisine—mushroom goulash soup (goulash in Hungary is actually a soup!), followed by a "Hungarian country dish". (I had suspected that once the seminar began, the food might have little local flavour, and my intuitions were largely correct: the Friday night meal at Ádám's comprised pitta bread and falafel with salad, on Shabbos lunch, at a local Jewish restaurant, was gefilte fish followed by cholent.)

Saturday afternoon consisted of a tour of the shuls, along with their history, given by Assael, followed by some activities in the Jewish community centre, including an insightful talk on Israel by Alex, in which he made an drew upon Jabotinski's ideas to make an unusual prognosis for the Israel/Palestine conflict. On Sunday Eva from Marom Budapest gave us a bus tour of the city, and on Sunday evening Andrea, also from Marom Budapest, introduced us to some of the local nightlife, so we were well looked after.

On Saturday evening we joined Marom Budapest for their Tu Bishvat party. This started out with a concert of local Jewish bands, one of which was Ádám's. They still hadn't got on by midnight, and, as I was badly in need of catching up on sleep and we had an early start the next day, I left, and missed them, which in retrospect was a pity, as everyone else was raving about them afterwards.

On Sunday, after the seminar, some of us who are left paid a visit to the Lukács Baths, one of the numerous thermal baths in Budapest. This was a new experience for me; I'd not been in thermal baths beforehand.

And finally, it wouldn't be me if I didn't burble on a bit about the language. Hungarian is a language completely unrelated to the surrounding Indo-European languages, so I wasn't able to recognise any cognates, except for obvious loan-words, such as szent (from Latin sanctus, "saint"). It's related to the Finno-Ugric languages, but this was, surprisingly, controversial for a long time; people thought it might actually be a Turkic language, due to the large numbers of Turkish words absorbed into it. There's also a large number of Slavic loan words.

I came across the idea a while ago that ancient Sumerian is actually a relative of Hungarian. (Sumerian is a singleton language, unrelated to any of the surrounding Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic or Elamo-Dravidian languages.) Wikipedia is scornful of the idea, but I read elsewhere (forgotten where, sorry) that Hungarian philologists are generally in denial about this. I think it would be very cool if it were true... but also very intriguing. Sumerians started writing their language down fifty-one centuries ago (though, because at first they used one glyph per word (like Chinese or ancient Egyptian), it's not until the number of glyphs dropped and the writing evolved into a syllabic alphabet that we are able to decipher it), and there's no evidence from the archaeological record for an invasion or mass movement of people into the Sumer region for a thousand years and more before that. Which raises the question of how far back, exactly, the putative ancestor of Sumerian and Hungarian might actually be, and where the ancestors of their speakers might have lived to end up in southern Iraq and eastern Europe (where the Magyars (pron: mudyars) lived before they invaded Hungary).

And last of the finallies: a new addition to my collection of languages in which I know how to respond to sneezes. In Hungarian, one says egészségedre!

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Other trip reports: Roni's, Assael's.

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I got that impression from you, but evidently I got it wrong.

Some have nobody with any musical ability, some have choirs and or a chazzan and effectively exclude the general congregation from participating, and some have enthusiastic congregational singing. I could pick equivalent examples of Orthodox shuls for any of those, though;

*nod* Take away the organ, and the service in the Heroes Shul would have fitted very nicely into Street Lane Gardens shul in Leeds (except that they do have alternate minyanim, for those for whom chazanus is a put-off).