Merchants, Artisans in Regained Hungarian Areas Victims of Anti-Jewish Curbs

Anti-Semitism in Hungary has not been limited to professionals and private businessmen, but is now being stringently applied to the merchants and artisans of the Slovakian and Ruthenian territories regained by Hungary after the final dismemberment of Czecho-Slovakia last fall.

Magyarsag, the local Arrow Cross (Nazi) newspaper today announced that the licenses of 2,430 merchants and artisans in three Ruthenian towns had been withdrawn. Needless to say, every one of these licensees were Jews.

In Munkacs, near the Russian frontier, according to Magyarsag, 500 merchants of every description have been deprived of their licenses, along with 280 artisans. In nearby Beregszasz, 350 have been deprived of their licenses, while in Ungvar 1,300 have been disfranchised.

Magyarsag, in scoring the administrators of the Jewish law for their "excessive leniency," points out that the proportion of Jews among the merchants and artisans of these northern towns is as follows: Munkacs, 62 percent; Beregszasz, 30 percent; Ungvar, 54 percent.

Elsewhere in Hungary, however, only Jewish holders of state monopoly licenses are being disfranchised–tobacconists, wine and liquor merchants, newsvendors, etc. Jewish merchants and artisans in general have not yet been molested. No further licenses of any description will be issued to Jews, however, until the percentage of Jewish merchants and artisans–which now ranges from 30 to 40 percent throughout Trianon Hungary–has been reduced to the six per cent required by law.

For the young Hungarian Jew just out of high school, or for the Jewish employee or state licensee who has lost his job, this means that every occupation except manual labor will be closed to him from now on. Jews may no longer even hawk produce or merchandise through the streets, for all hucksters must have a license and all licenses are now forbidden to Jews.

Even to get a job as a common day laborer is becoming increasingly difficult these days. Employers are growing reluctant to employ Jews in any capacity, for fear of arousing the ire of local Nazis and other anti-Semites, or of being fined for some technical infraction of the "Jewish law."

Typical of the difficulties now being encountered by employers who hire Jews, is the recent case of a Budapest contractor who was fined for having employed a Jewish clerk for work on a construction project. Actually, he had hired an 18-year-old Jewish high school graduate as apprentice, which was entirely in keeping with the law. But the employer was unable to convince an anti-Semitic building inspector that the youth, obviously better educated and better clothed than the average day laborer, was in fact a laborer and not a timekeeper or clerk–with the result that he was fined and his Jewish employee deprived of a job.

Thus, the net result of the anti-Jewish law–originally framed to "free Hungary from the clutches of Jewish bankers and industrialists"–has been the deprivation of a large number of low-income professionals, clerks, and petty merchants of their means of livelihood, without greatly affecting the position of the wealthy Jews the law was designed to hit.

WEALTHY NOT HIT BY LAW

The wealthy Jews, in fact, are almost as secure as ever, and for the following reasons:

(1) Their capital and their financial ability is indispensable for the maintenance of Hungary’s economy, and it is evident even to anti-Semites, that what injures them would tend to injure the economic structure of Hungary itself.

(2) There are few Magyars qualified to replace Jews in the key positions of finance and industry, for the simple reason that Magyars have always eschewed business and industry for government service and professional work. (In 1934, no less than 74 per cent of all Hungarian students were preparing themselves for government jobs, while more than half the remaining 26 per cent were Jews.)

(3) The majority of Jewish corporations in Hungary–and admittedly they are many–have a high percentage of British, French, and American stockholders; and if these corporations were to be expropriated, their foreign business would dry up immediately and their stock would fall to dangerous levels.

(4) Finally, a wealthy Jew whose position is still endangered, despite the defenses already outlined, always has the final recourse of buying off his would-be successors–a defense obviously unavailable to a low-income newspaperman, chemist, engineer, or petty licensed merchant.

The prevalence of bribery and graft in the administration of the "Jewish law" in its upper brackets, in fact, has had the effect of alienating many Hungarians who formerly acquiesced, in the belief that anti-Semitism would not injure wealthy Jews unduly, and would create an opportunity for poor but capable young Magyars to take over the economic as well as social and political control of Hungary. Such persons are now turning against anti-Semitism, it seems, in the conviction that the law has only created corruption in high office, without affecting the real situation at all.

Unfortunately for Jewry, however, such persons are in the minority. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Nazis and anti-Semites are beginning to clamor not only for stricter enforcement of the existing law, but for a third anti-Jewish law, in the hope of thereby creating still more jobs for young "deserving Aryans."