The Holocaust Museum cordially invites you to the
Imperial Transition 1919-1920.
What Next?
International conference – Holocaust Museum,
Budapest – 16‒17 September 2024.

The Paris Peace Treaties (1920), concluding World War I, transformed dynastic em-pires and pre-existing structures. Ethnic self-identification, which gained prominence during the war, became the foundation for new national policies, inherently carrying various tensions. This process, spanning the two World Wars, precipitated a series of imperial transitions that profoundly impacted both local elites and diverse religious and ethnic populations. In the context of loyalty to new authorities, established strat-egies were disrupted, novel expectations were rejected, or temporary modi vivendi were developed.

These changes particularly affected the Jewish populations of the former Aus-tro-Hungarian Monarchy, including those in historical Hungary, who had to navigate new modes of coexistence with local authorities in their diaspora. While religious tra-dition broadly regulated this process, identification with modern national ideologies added complexity. Alongside the previous Hungarian-Israelite self-definition, Jewish national consciousness—one of the modern Central European national ideologies—gained prominence in successor states. The Jewish community itself entered a het-erogeneous state of consciousness, facing multiple options. Individual adherence to the Hungarian nation, Orthodox religious traditions, and Zionist commitments were not mutually exclusive alternatives. The imperial transitions surrounding World War II, coupled with antisemitic public sentiment and racial legislation, further nuanced or compelled revisions of these es-tablished commitments.
This conference aims to explore and present the evolution of Jewish and non-Jewish loyalties and strategies within the context of successive imperial transitions.

Date
16 September 2024, 9:30 am
17 September 2024, 10:30 am

Location
1094 Budapest, 39. Páva street

The conference will be held in Hungarian with English interpretation.
Please RVSP by 15 September, 2024

Registration
https://bit.ly/Impériumváltás_1919-1920

Csatolmányok