Janet Kerekes

Masked Ball at the White Cross Cafe: The Failure of Jewish Assimilation Janet Kerekes

Masked Ball at the White Cross Café examines the efforts of Hungarian Jews to assimilate after emancipation, between 1867 and 1920. Foremost, the book is written from the non-Jewish perspective. The purpose of the book is to expose the real issue at stake after emancipation, which gave rise to the Jewish Question: The assimilation of the Jews into the host society with the imperative to "become just like us." Crucial to understanding the pivotal role of assimilation is the centuries leading up to 1867. Chapters on the era of Toleration, the Enlightenment, and the Liberal Era provide this grounding. Simultaneously, the book engages in a comparison with Britain, and shows that Jewish efforts to assimilate were unsuccessful not only in Hungary, but also in Britain. Within the limits set by the national context, both countries responded uniformly to the presence of unreformed Jews in their midst. The cutoff date, 1920, underscores the finality of the rejection of Jewish nonassimilation. The role of contingency, which determined the precise fate of European Jewry, came into play at that time.