[The purpose of the Digest is informative: Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.-Editor.]
It is the leaders of the “Awakening Magyars,” the anti-Semitic movement in Hungary, whose program calls for the extermination of the Jews as the alleged destroyers of Hungary’s fortunes, who are now disgraced before the world as the perpetrators of the greatest, most dishonorable, counterfeit conspiracy in history. The Jewish press points to this fact in commenting on the reports from Budapest.
“The patriotic mask of these Hungarian superpatriots has now been torn away,” writes Avigdur Fuchs in the “Jewish Daily News,” “and they stand before the world in their true light. Through the sensational revelations of the Paris police the world has now learned that the patriotic ‘saviors of Hungary’ are in reality a band of terrible criminals of the lowest class. Having lost their huge fortunes through the war and the revolution the gentle Hungarian nobles attempted to create millions by manufacturing and circulating false French francs.”
The writer further draws a comparison between the “Awakening Magyars” and the Ku Klux Klan, which he calls the “Awakening Magyars” of America. “The Klan, too,” he says, “is rotten through and through, full of criminals and degenerates who parade under the white mask of ‘one hundred percent’ patriots who want to save America from the ‘foreigners’ In the midst of the Klan, too, there are revealed every day new swindles and scandals.”
The “Day,” commenting editorially on the Hungarian counterfeit swindle, points out that anti-Semitism rarely goes alone without some form of criminality.
“As a rule,” the paper observes, “an active, aggressive anti-Semite is also an ugly type of person generally. In addition to being an anti-Semite he is a profiteer, a criminal, a murderer, a thief, a swindler, or at least a counterfeiter.
“Hungary, the country of the white terror, the country of bestial, tyrannical anti-Semitism, offers now the classical example of the kind of people the anti-Semites are and of the nature of the anti-Semitic disease.
“Perhaps the world will now see the present black, Jew-baiting Hungary in its true garb. Perhaps America will realize who are some of those that frequently find protection and friendship here.”
The “Panama scandal,” which was perpetrated by anti-Semites in France, is recalled by the “Jewish Morning Journal,” which hopes that since that incident helped France to recover from her anti-Semitic intoxication a similar result will now come about in Hungary.
“The agitation against Jews must subside,” we are told, “when it is seen to what low depths the men who make Jew hatred their stock-in-trade sink. It is to be hoped that the same result as came about in France after the Panama scandal will now take place in Hungary where the anti-Semites have been exposed as ordinary swindlers. Jews have done a great deal for Hungary and were treated well there before the war. The situation in that country cannot become normal until the attitude toward the Jews will change back to what it was about twelve years ago.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
