Race, Nation or People? Reflections on Magyarization by the Slovak Old School, Political Catholicism and the Hlasists

The study deals with the impact of the racial discourse on the nationality question in Hungary during the age of dualism between 1867 and 1918. In particular, it is concerned with the images of the so called Magyarization produced by the Slovak national movement. In the 1870s and 1880s the Slovak nationalists tried to prove that the Slovaks who allegedly had belonged to the "Aryan" race could have not be assimilated by the "inferior" races as the oriental Magyars. This partially changed at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, as the Slovak national ideology increasingly overlapped with the antisemitism. Slovak conservatives but also catholic and liberal populists portrayed the Hungarian Jewry, which they identified with the orientalized "Jewish race", as the epitomization of the Magyarization that became a "Jewish issue". In this view the Magyarization would be a threat not just to the Slovaks but to the Magyar "people" as well.