The Jewish presence in Hungary dates back to the Kingdom of Hungary, with some evidence suggesting their arrival more than 600 years before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 CE. Historical records confirm that Jewish communities lived in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, and it is even believed that certain segments of the Hungarian tribes followed Judaism. Jewish officials were serving the king during the reign of Andrew II in the early 13th century. However, from the late 13th century, religious tolerance began to wane, and Hungary’s treatment of Jews became aligned with the discriminatory policies seen in Western Europe.
By the time of World War I, Hungary’s Ashkenazi Jews were well-integrated into society. By the early 1900s, Jews made up 5% of Hungary’s population and 23% of Budapest’s residents, with significant contributions to science, the arts, and business. By 1941, over 17% of Budapest’s Jewish population had converted to Catholicism.
During the interwar period, anti-Jewish measures intensified as Hungary sought to reclaim territories lost in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, aligning itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. From 1938, Hungary, under Miklós Horthy, introduced anti-Jewish laws modeled after Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. After Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, Jews from across the country were deported to Auschwitz, with 437,000 sent there between May and July 1944, the majority of whom were killed upon arrival.
According to the 2011 Hungarian census, 10,965 people (0.11% of the population) identified as religious Jews, with 96.2% of them also identifying as ethnic Hungarians. Estimates in 2010 placed Hungary’s Jewish population between 54,000 and 130,000, mostly in Budapest. The country is home to numerous active synagogues, including the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, after New York’s Temple Emanu-El.
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