This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.

Antisemitism is tolerated in Hungary - and not only in its crudest form, as when a uniformed rabble marches in the streets or when Neo-Nazis provoke Jews in front of their synagogues. It is also part and parcel of Hungarian right wing politics. Usually antisemitism is coded, but the code is very simple. Here is just one recent example.

The right wing daily “Magyar Hirlap” reported, on October 10, the unveiling of a statue of one of the leading ideologues of the “Christian course” after World War 1, Catholic Bishop Ottokár Prohászka (1858-1927). The Bishop advocated antisemitic discrimination, in particular the so called “numerus clausus” which restricted the number of Jews admitted to institutes of higher education to six per cent - the proportion of Jews in the overall population before the Holocaust. The numerus clausus was the first rupture in the constitutional equality granted to Hungarian Jews in 1867.

It is not a bit surprising that the vice-president of Hungarian parliament, Sándor Lezsák of the Fidesz party, gave a speech which amounted to an apologetic review of the so called “Christian course” of history and politics between the two world wars, when the “Christian-national” idea was official ideology. Lezsák was not disturbed by the fact that one of the main pillars of this idea was political antisemitism and that the rulers of Hungary were the first ones in Europe in the twentieth century to enact anti-Jewish discriminatory laws.

On the contrary, Lezsák did not mince his words. He said that after 1945, the names of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary, and Prohászka were not to be mentioned. He asserted that “the influence of this spiritual terror exists until today in our homeland”. According to one of the highest dignitaries of Hungary, one of the biggest “crimes” of Ottokár Prohászka was that “he advocated in politics in publications and teaching the Christian-social doctrine, and that he raised his voice to drive back the cosmopolitan-parasite class…”

It was just this language, describing Jews as “parasites” - this “moderate” antisemitism - that contributed to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Hungarians were bystanders to the deportation of around half a million Hungarian Jews during six weeks in the spring of 1944.

When, on October 14, the liberal (SZDSZ) MP Péter Gusztos spoke in parliament about this scandal, a storm of protest broke out in the conservative camp, demanding that he should ask pardon for quoting what is correctly stated at the Budapest Holocaust museum: that Prohászka was one of the leaders of antisemitic ideology.

According to the Catholic daily “Magyar Kurir” , the Catholic Archbishop Balázs Bábel said in his speech at the unveiling of Prohászka’s statue, that he was educated according to the doctrines of Ottokár Prohászka. As a seminarian, he said, he was “witness to the shameful event when, in 1945, at the instigation of Mihály Károlyi (democratic Hungarian politician) the poet György Faludy and his communist comrades destroyed the statue in the Karolyi park.”

A real miracle happened, at least according to this senior leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church. He was born in 1950 and yet he witnessed an event which took place in 1945!

But of course the memory of this 58 year old man must already be very weak. As a matter of fact, Faludy was at the time a social democrat and the event did not take place in 1945, but a year later. According to the Catholic daily, a journalist asked him if it is acceptable that in the Budapest Holocaust museum the picture of Prohászka is located near the picture of Hitler with the text: “one of the leading persons of the antisemitic ideology”.

Archbishop Bábel answered that he “will not visit the Holocaust museum until they change the text and the setting”.

It is not likely that the museum will change the correct text: after all the atholic vice-president of Hungarian parliament confirmed that Prohászka “raised his voice to drive back the cosmopolitan-parasite class…”

Prohászka had, of course, some “good Jewish friends” and he was also ready to convert Jews who were Hungarian nationalist. But in most of his declarations about Jews he did not speak about conversions. Already in 1893 he explained in an article that the Christian state should not accept Jews, “but as soon as possible should remove them”, because they are “cancer”, who has “gnawed off the Hungarian people to a skeleton” and “because they have no conscience, they strangle heartlessly their victims, whom it had succeeded to take in” who “wanted always to rule the [Hungarian] nation”.

Prohászka considered the Jews to be a “damned people.” He regarded them as dangers for the nation, as “bugs and rats,” according to the Catholic priest György Kiss, who published his autobiography in 1987. (Prohászka published his antisemitic views in English: The Jewish Question in Hungary, The Hague, Holland, 1920, and also in German: Die Judenfrage in Ungarn, Hammerschlaege, Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund. Hamburg 1921, Heft 21.)

The Budapest Nazi editors Gede brothers published in 2003 the selected writings of Ottokár Prohászka under the title “My antisemitism” and no Catholic protest was heard.

As the Hungarian writer András Nyerges said, it is not decent to say that Prohászka was as far as “race doctrine” is concerned a follower of Hitler, because he advocated this views much earlier.

So the picture of this antisemitic ideologue is to remain in the Holocaust museum in Budapest.

With the erection of statues for Prohászka, one of the ideologues of Hungarian “Christian” antisemitism, comes also the demand to change the name of a Budapest street named after the teacher and journalist Béla Somogyi (1868 - 1920) who was murdered by officers of the Horthy regime, who threw his corpse into the Danube.

Somogyi did not participate in the short lived Hungarian communist regime in 1919. But during the white terror - when thousands of Jews, communists and “communists” were murdered by those inspired by the “Christian-national” idea - he courageously reported on their crimes in the social-democratic daily “Népszava” (an antifascist paper published until Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944; today probably the best Hungarian daily).

There is one street in Budapest named after this martyr of the labor movement and the conservative Fidesz councilors of the district voted for the change of the name together with the representative of the liberal SZDSZ party. Socialists and other democrats have protested against this planned change. It looks as if that protest will be successful.