Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History 9789633865200

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Jewish Budapest

B U ÖÄ'p'fe ST Monuments, Rites, History

by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, Viktoria Pusztai and Andrea Strbik

Edited by Géza Komoróczy

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the Torah, too. He settled down in the Jewish street of Buda, chose a Hungarian name, Etil (Attila) and learned Hungarian as well as German. He got married, had two sons and became "a great man among Christians, someone close to the king", being a Chancellor of the Treasury in the court of Lajos (Louis) II. He then had an affair with a Christian woman and when this became public, to avoid punishment and maybe even to further his career, he got baptized (ca. 1510). His godfather was none other than Imre Perenyi, Palatine of Hungary. That is how he got his new first name: Imre, in full: Imre Szerencsis (Fortunatus), Emericus Zerenczes (Zerenshes / Zerenchees), Imre the Fortunate. "This Jewish Imre (Imrich Jud) left his wife and child in the Jewish street (Juden Gasse) in Buda (Ofen)"—writes an almost contemporary chronicler, Hans Dernschwam. He took a second wife, most probably his former mistress, a German noblewoman from Kolozsvar by the name of Holdin (Held) Anna, had another son and moved to a more elegant neighborhood, to Szent Gyorgy utca, befitting his new position as treasurer (thesaurarius), the leading figure in financial affairs of the court. CASTLE HILL

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24. Imre Szerercses's note in a Hebrew manuscript {top, right)

He was often attacked under Lajos (Louis) II. He may have made mistakes and may have given bad advice in the complicated and insecure financial situation of the king, but his enemies accused him of many things unjustly. They blamed him because there were not enough funds in the Treasury to fight the Turks, or because relief forces reached Nandorfehervar (today Belgrade) too late and the fortress fell. Szerencses did not initiate the debasement of coinage—minting money worth only about half of its face-value—in 1521, although he did participate in it, but a scandal broke out and the king had him imprisoned. As Eliah ha-Levi of Stambul (Istanbul) puts it, "he was imprisoned because of a Christian woman". The Diet of Rakosmezfi wanted to sentence him to death by burning. This was when Istvan Werboczy first used (1517) the term "half-Jew" derogatorily, complaining that they are now "allowed to hold public position", that "we have to turn to them for money, for usury". But after two weeks of prison the king released Szerencses in exchange for a large sum of money. He was celebrating his liberation with his friends in his home when the servants of nobles participating in the Diet, bailiffs, hussars and the mob fell upon his house; Szerencses himself managed to escape but the rampage continued, gold was taken by the sackful and, on the third day, the mob broke into the Jewish street. A pogrom ensued. It was the army who stopped them after a whole day's fight. Shortly after the pogrom Szerencses was still able to con25. The Fortunate One \fortunatus). vince the magnates that he could restore the financial situation of the royal court. He based his plans M a n sitting under on the copper mines of the Fuggers in Hungary. These were entrusted to Szerencses on the advice a canopy, holding of none other than Werb6czy. The success of these adventurous transactions strengthened his posia money-pouch tion. In exchange for his debts the king awarded him the thirtieth of the taxes collected in Buda and some other compensation. A few weeks before the Battle of Mohacs, in June-July 1526, Szerencses donated a large amount of money to the king to support the campaign against the Turks. This was one of his last acts. Szerencses died around the time of the Battle of Mohacs. A rabbinical responsum later claimed that in the hour of his death, crying and praying in the presence of several Jews, he returned to the Jewish faith according to the traditional ceremony of teshuvah. Still in his lifetime, a Halakhic dispute emerged in Buda about the situation of Imre Szerencses. According to Ashkenazi custom his two sons (Avraham and Efraim), who remained members of the Jewish community, were called to the Torah by their grandfather's name rather than by their baptized father's. The sons, embarrassed since their grandfather's name was well known, did not accept this and declined to make aliyah. Finally, after the death of Szerencses, the rabbi of Buda, Naftali haKohen, permitted the use of the name ben Shelomo when calling the sons to the Torah. Other rabbis were consulted about the issue, as customary. The rabbi of Padua, Meir Katzenellenbogen (1473-1565), a cousin of R. Naftali, noted that even the king and other nobles are mentioned in blessings in the synagogue, though they are not Jews. If their names can be pronounced, R. Shlomo deserves it all the more since he did so much for the well-being of his people and he was friendly towards all honest and kind persons. His benevolence was described in a responsum by Eliah ben Benjamin ha-Levi, rabbi of Istanbul, after the death of Szerencses: every Friday afternoon before the Sabbath he would give charity to poor Jews. After the death of their baptized father Szerencses brought two children from Austria to Buda and raised them as Jews. He saved Jewish men and women from the death penalty. He saved the Jewish community from the charge of sacrificing Christian children; he spared no trouble or money to clear the Jews from the accusation and he was able to prove that it was the 2 0

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denouncer himself who tried to frame the Jews by hiding blood among them. One of his sons wrote that his father warned the Jews in a secret Hebrew letter when they were in danger. He prevented the expulsion of Jews from Prague, when the city was under Hungarian rule. Szerencses always acted in favor of Israel, both personally and through his wealth. It was announced in every synagogue in Buda that whoever considers Szerencses lost for Israel will be punished in person and in his belongings by the Prefect. Szerencses was attacked by Christians, thrown into prison and almost burnt because they claimed that he was still a Jew. He could escape only at the cost of major financial sacrifice. The decision in favor of the sons of Szerencses embraced merit over the strict law: "We may mourn him for mixing with Christians, but we should not forget that he had always cared about the well-being of his folk and helped people close or far away from him. His deeds show that he regretted his conversion and he feared God. He deserves to be accepted in the community, not rejected." It is interesting to note that since Szerencses was a Sephardi Jew, his second marriage would not have violated Jewish law: in those times Sephardi Halakhah allowed polygamy, Sephardim were not subject to the prohibition of Rabbenu Gershom. His only sins were that he got baptized and married a Christian woman on the second occasion. Looking at the manuscript left behind by Szerencses we can see that all his personal notes are written in Hebrew script. The Halakhic decision in favor of his sons was later confirmed by Moshe Isserles, rabbi of Cracow. The distinguished scholar knew about the case only from R. Meir's responsum but he accepted the decision due to the authority of the rabbi of Padua: "Once he gave his permission, who can have a word after the king?" In any case, for the Ashkenazi world this teshuvah meant, at least theoretically, opening new doors for apostates to return to Judaism. The two Jewish sons of Imre Szerencses left Buda after the Battle of MoMcs and changed their name to Zaksz (Sachs). They claimed that the name was an abbreviation of "Holy seed of Seneor (Zera Kadosh Seneor)". One of them, Abraham, got permission from the widowed Queen Mary to settle down in Kismarton (Eisenstadt) with his family, children, household and wealth. Some of his offspring moved as far as Vilna. In spite of their dependence, the life and behavior of Jews, their relations with the surrounding society in the renaissance Buda of King Matthias or the Jagellos manifest the forms we see in modern bourgeois societies. Their livelihood was determined by the surrounding society and was basically restricted to professions connected to trade and finances. Otherwise there was wide room to maneuver. Beyond the ordinary members of the community, rich and poor, there were the learned rabbis, the Jewish leaders who adjusted their appearance to the expectations of the royal court where they were accepted, the Jews who converted to Christianity for the sake of a career but maintained Jewish contacts and the assimilationists who were Jewish only by birth. Though individuals left, the Jewish community of Buda remained a traditional one, surrounded by a society which can be considered bourgeois already around 1500. A foreign responsum mentioned that in the 1500s in Hungary and the surrounding countries the hazzan, holding the Torah scroll, used to ask for a blessing over the king or the prince of the country and his retinue. The Jews of Buda were grateful and faithful to the ruler who admitted and accepted them. This world did not exist in isolation. To characterize the surrounding atmosphere we should also mention an ardent enemy, the anti-Jewish demagogue Istvan Werboczy (1458-1541). He was a member of the gentry, a jurist and high state official. His xenophobia and his envy of successful Jews drove him to constant accusations, fighting against persons rather than for causes, even though occasionally he himself could be charged with the same violations as the accused Jews. His prejudiced views were expressed in the form of restrictive laws in the Tripartitum opus iuris consuetudinarii (1517). The code ruled that when a Jew appears in court with a Christian he has to take an oath prior to the process wearing a short coat, Jewish hat, barefoot, facing East, swearing on the five books of Moses, saying that the Biblical curse should strike him if he is guilty. The Jewish oath of Werbficzy was mandatory in the Middle Ages. Its text was based on the Jewish oath of Erfurt elaborated by Conrad, Archbishop of Mainz (twelfth century), and the Buda Law Book. CASTLE HILL

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History played a trick on Werboczy, for he is said to have been buried in the cemetery of the old Jewish quarter (auf dem Judenfriedhof],

in Krisztinavaros (Hans Dernschwam, 1555). His elegant

summer house and garden, which he received after the Battle of MoMcs, stood nearby. (He owned another house on Castle Hill.) Werbficzy died during an epidemic (1541), but his death may have been hastened by a glass of refreshment handed to him by the pasha of Buda at a feast. The pasha did not appreciate the constant legal skullduggery of the "old jurist", he was not used to this in other countries. Whatever the case, Turkish authorities did not allow his remains within the city walls. His tomb has not been found since.

(9) Jahudiler Mahallesi Jews did not leave Buda in the late summer days following the Battle of Mohacs (Wednesday, August 29,1526), as did so many others. Josef ha-Kohen's chronicle (1554) is explicit about this: "Jews stayed in the city." They did not escape because pogrom followed upon pogrom in Western Hungary (Pozsony, Sopron, etc.); people fled from Western Hungary to Buda instead. After the rout of the Hungarian army and the death of the king the city must have been left without public authorities and administrative institutions for weeks. The official report of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566) said, "the coward inhabitants of Budun realized that the Padishah of the world is approaching them and they scattered like the stars of the Great Bear; some of them went to the mountains or other hidden places while others entered the inner Castle begging for mercy. (...) The king, tired of his life, sent the keys of the Castle to the footstool of the Padishah's throne begging for mercy." "King" is probably meant symbolically here since the King of Hungary, Lajos (Louis) II was dead by then. A Turkish official chronicler, efendi (that is, Mr.) Ferdi writes (1542): "Nobody stayed in the Castle of Budun (...) apart from some faithless persons of easy virtue, the poor and the Jews. When the banners, shining like the Sun, came into sight around the city, the above mentioned Jews, wearing white death robes (kittel / pallium Judaicum)

came to meet the victorious army, threw them-

selves to the earth and begged for mercy."

There are other chronicles of the events. "Jews, who were numerous in Buda, fought heroically for their lives and freedom. Before Solomet the Turk marched into the city, two hundred of those who were too poor to escape occupied the Royal Castle. When the Sultan wanted to enter the Castle, he was prevented by cannonade and gunfire, even though they did not have enough food for more than a few days. The Sultan promised them their lives if they let him march into the Castle without further obstacles and he kept his promise after entering the Castle, sitting on the throne. Finally he convinced them to accompany him to Turkey." (Johannes Cuspinianus / Spiessheimer, Oratio protreptica,

1527)

This diplomat, trying to convince the Christian princes with this "Stimulating Speech" to fight against the Turks, probably exaggerated the heroism of the Jews of Buda: even if they did try to defend the city they could not have done so for long. Based on various independent European, Turkish and Jewish reports which seem to be well informed about several details we may suppose that after Lajos died and the widowed queen fled, the Jews of Buda, formerly serfs of the Chamber, remained the only representatives of public authority for a while. Buda was empty, surviving members of the Royal Court having fled the country. The Jews, realizing what had happened, went to greet the victorious army approaching Buda. An "alaman" of Buda, i.e. a German (Ashkenazi) Jew, Jasif ibn Solomon (Josef ben Shlomo), probably accompanied by a few members of the community, appeared before the Turks and handed them the 2 2

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keys of the city. He was granted exemption from taxes as a reward. Where were the keys given to the Turks? Already in Fóldvár, or only in Buda? The Jews visited the Turkish camp in death robes {kittel), in ceremonial garb. At first they only met Ibrahim pasha, but after a few days, on September 11, after a fast—the Fast of Gedaliah (Tishri 3)—, they met the Sultan who marched into Buda in the meantime. Did they really hand over the keys? Maybe. But the Padishah needed neither submission nor the keys: he was the victor. Suleiman "was merciful" towards the Jewish population of Buda, as we know from ha-Kohen's chronicle, so he sent them to his country, Turkey. They left at the end of September (September 21/22, 1526), on the first day of Sukkot, by boat. The official diary of the Padishah notes as follows: "On the 14th of the month zil hidzhe in the year 932 (September 21, 1526), Saturday: (...) the Jews of Buda were taken to ships, to be shipped to Turkey." Cuspinianus says that the Sultan "persuaded" them to accompany him. There were several legends about these events in Europe. According to a German newspaper of the time Suleiman "offered a choice" to the Jews: they could go with him or stay in Buda. They were to decide within three days. Of course, they all wanted to stay in Buda. Therefore the Turks came to Buda and divided the Jews into three groups. One group consisted of people older than thirty or forty years, the second group was people younger than twenty, the third group was made up of women and children. They had to decide again, this time in groups, whether they wanted to stay. Again their answer was unani-

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mously yes. Upon this the Sultan massacred the older men and took the women, children and men under twenty with him. Johannes Kessler in Switzerland heard that the Turks occupied Buda after a siege. Jews participated in the heroic defense of the city, though they did not have an army of their own {kriegslüt). "Of the three and a half thousand Jews barely twenty survived", he says. The number of the victims must be an exaggeration but it gives us an idea about the size of the Jewish community before the Turks invaded Buda. Various leaflets, the newspapers (zeyttung) of sixteenth-century Europe, reported similar figures. A Turkish source, Ferdi, also mentions two thousand Jewish "families" in Buda. It is possible that in Kessler's as in Ferdi's chronicle events of the weeks directly after the Battle of Mohács got mixed up with some later events. But the figures are comparable in the various European sources and Turkish reports confirm these numbers. We are probably not far off the mark if we presume that half a thousand or more Jews lived in Buda. Sixteenth-century European newspapers as well as later chronicles tell the story of the fall of Buda as was appropriate in the case of defeat: resorting to customary elements of journalism, with trite phraseology, exaggerating the havoc and losses suffered. The only incontrovertible fact seems to be that, after the Battle of Mohács, the Sultan took the Jews remaining in the abandoned city of Buda as hostages. Or rather he resettled them, just like the Babylonian ruler Nebukhadnezzar had resettled the craftsmen of Jerusalem (587/586 B.C.E.). Suleiman, too, needed merchants and craftsmen, which was why he took the Jews with him. Interesting evidence of the scattering of the Jews of Buda in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire can be found in the sixteenth-century responsa; an increased number of women whose husband disappeared (agunot) turned to the rabbinical courts (bet din) asking to be considered widows. Their husbands had disappeared several years earlier, they were not likely ever to return and the women wanted to remarry. War and deportation had ruined several Jewish families in Buda. CASTLE HILL

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26. Jews and Turks defending Buda against King Ferdinand's army, 1541

According to the Turkish chronicler Kemalpashazade (1483?-1534) "by leaving their home country the merchant-craftsmen escaped great poverty" (Mohâcs-Name, ca. 1530). The situation of the Jews changed after the Turkish occupation of Buda. The Turks were sure to win the Jews over to their side by granting them certain advantages: "It is considered a great wonder that after occupying Buda and bringing the Jews to Constantinople the Turks did not sell them as serfs but let them free; they were only obliged to pay taxes. Had they been sold into slavery, this would have caused the decline of all of Turkey's Jewry because—according to their customs— they would have been obliged to redeem them. (Hans Dernschwam, Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel,

1555)

After the establishment of Turkish administration in Hungary the Jews of Buda, or rather the former Jews of Buda, were free to trade throughout the Ottoman Empire. Jewish sources mention several "holy communities of Hungarians (ungarus)". Jewish communities from Buda could be found in Istanbul (Constantinople), Salonika (Thessaloniki), Vidin, Sofia and Kavala (Greece) as well as in the Holy Land. Turkish documents from the mid-sixteenth century from Safed (Tzfat) mention ten to fifteen Hungarian families. They maintained contacts with the rest of their families in Buda, receiving help from them. With financial help from R. Noah from Buda Hungarian Jews opened a separate yeshivah in Safed (1619) and their foundation (keren kayyemet) helped the poor in Jerusalem, too. Some sixty Hungarian Jewish families together with R. Naftali ha-Kohen ended up in Sofia. They became members of the German (Ashkenazi) community. The fame of the Buda rabbi reached even Josef Karo or Caro (1488-1575), the author of the Shulhan Arukh, who lived in this area, in the Balkans, in Adrianople (Edirne) for an extended period before moving to Safed (1536). * The religious customs (minhagim) of the Jews of Buda (benei Budun) differed from those of other communities. Josef Caro mentions that three weeks before Tish'ah be-Av, between Tammuz 17 and Av 9, the Jews of Buda refrained from business and trade, though Halakhah prescribes only one day of rest. Work is not prohibited on this fast day, not to mention business, which is a "much smaller issue". But if the "Hungarians" want to make this day of mourning even harder, says Caro, they may do so. If a man gave a ring to a woman it was not considered an act of engagement among Hungarians living in Turkey, i.e. the Jews of Buda, though this custom prevailed in other communities. This resulted in disputes between them and other Jews. Hungarians interpreted the instructions regarding kosher meat somewhat loosely. Glancing onto the top of the neighbor's house from their window was acceptable to Hungarians here, just like in Buda. (The difference between Buda and the Turkish lands being that while in Buda people sleep inside the house, in the Balkans and the South it was customary to sleep on the roof most of the year.) The "hard" pronunciation of the Hungarian Jews (compared to the pronunciation of German Jews) was striking. They said bedzh (as in Hungarian: Bées) instead of Wien. Whether the Duna / Donau / Dunaj was identical with the river Tuna was debated for a long time by the scholars. This lack of clarity, too, was caused by the difference between voiced and unvoiced pronunciation. Instead of Ofen (Buda) they wrote Oben, which suggests that they pronounced the letter b in the middle of the word not like it was customary, as v (Oven), but in the German manner, as f (Ofen). Or the other way around, they used a voiced v instead of the /"sound. The usual Ashkenazi / Yiddish pronunciation of the name is Oyvn / Oyfn. In 1554 the Hungarian synagogue of Constantinople burned down. From this date Jews of Buda started to attend the German synagogue and founded a joint Burial Society (in Aramaic: Hevra Kaddisha), but when it came to electing the head of the community some tension arose and the Jews of Buda no longer wanted to belong into one group with the German and Spanish Jews. As a consequence, certain communities decided to break off all contact with the unsociable Hungarian Jews. The excommunication was lifted only later by the joint decision of the most influential rabbis of the 2 4

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Balkans who quoted the Biblical story of Benjamin's tribe (Judges 20-21): never again can a whole tribe be excommunicated from Israel. Slowly, by the end of the sixteenth century, the alienation of and discrimination against the Jews of Buda had vanished. * As for Buda, the earlier community having left the city, practically no Jews remained. King Janos (John) (1526-1540) and Ferdinand (King of Hungary between 1526 and 1564) took turns in distributing the homes of the Jews among their subjects. The new owners occasionally even went to court to argue their rights to the donation-house on Jewish street. The fortress was extended up to the Jewish cemetery. The Jewish street got a new name for a while: Szent Marton (St. Martin) utca. After August 29, 1541, when the fate of Buda under Turkish rule was sealed, Jews started moving in from neighboring towns like Rackeve or Esztergom or returning from other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The documents of Jews resettling in Buda show Sarajevo, Szendro (Semendria), Belgrade, Vidin, Kavala, Sofia, Salonika, Adrianople (Edirne), Istanbul, even Safed as their former place of residence. They moved back to the place where they had lived before, the Jewish quarter, the Jewish street (the lower, north-western segment of today's Tincsics Mihaly utca). This is when they carved the date, 1541, into a pillar of their old synagogue. A German traveler, writing about Turkish Buda a quarter of a century later, states that "there are plenty of Jews and Turks in the city but only a few good Christians..." (Stephan Gerlach, 1573). Around 1569 the rabbi of Buda was R. Hayyim Hatsman ben Yitzhak. The first Jewish Prefect appointed by the Turks (kethilda) was Abraham ibn Jusuf. The district (mahalle) around the Vienna gate was named after the Jews. In Turkish it was called Jahudiler mahallesi / Mahallei jehudian, "Jewish city", i.e. "the Jews' street", "Jewish quarter", "Jewish street", or in Hungarian spelling Mahalle Zsido ucsa. It occupied two large blocks East of the Jewish gate (Porta Judaica), B£csi kapu ter, next to the city wall. It was not a ghetto, but a separate quarter. In Sandor Scheiber's opinion the new cemetery of the Jewish quarter was in Vizivaros, East-northeast to it, in the space between today's Hunfalvy and Batthyany utca. But they may have used the old cemetery for a while. Why did they have to open a new cemetery? We can only guess. A possible explanation is that the bodies of those who fell during the siege of Buda (1529), Christians and Turks, were all buried in the Jewish cemetery (judenfreithof] which made the cemetery ritually unfit for further use by Jews. Jews lived in other parts of the city, too, in the Taban and Vizivaros which had an area called civitas Judeorum, and possibly around the Csaszar bath. Jews of Buda who ended up in other parts of the Ottoman Empire remained attached to the city. They retained their seats in their synagogue for a long time and even paid taxes. This tradition was continued by some of their children. If circumstances allowed they moved back to Buda. It was often disputed whether they could keep their rights, whether they could remain full members of the Jewish community. The Jews of Buda would have been happy to get rid of them. Legal conflicts arising from this situation were discussed by Halakhic authorities all over the world. From a responsum (ca. 1630) of Hayyim ben Shabbetai (ca. 1555-1647), rabbi of Salonika: "(...) Among those who fled were people whose grandfather lived in Buda and they still have houses, shops and other property in Buda, and are still paying taxes after these to the (Hungarian) king. (...) And when the Almighty took stock of His people and Edom [the Christians] and Yismael [the Muslims] made peace [Peace of Zsitvatorok, 1606], these people took their families and set forth to return to their country and properties. Seeing this, those who stayed at home and liked to quarrel said to each other deceitfully: Let us take measures among ourselves that those who return should not be entitled to occupy their property until we discuss their cases. Those who are returning said that they would never have left if they were not forced to, they never wanted to leave the city of Budun but they were forced to, they had to save their lives. Response ( t e s h u v a h ) : Law supports those who are returning, people who stayed in the city can not keep them from returning."

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