No, the fear and ambivalence of Hungarian Jewry was not because of 50 years of communism.
My parents left in 1948, when I was three.
I had been baptized in Budapest,
and I didn’t learn that I was jewish till I was nine,
in Montreal.
Other jews of Hungarian origin in Canada did not learn till they were adults
— and some are still in denial to this day.
Nor did it start with the Shoah.
Bigotry, oppression and pogroms had been ongoing for centuries.
My father converted when he was 19, in 1919,
because of numerus clausus,
changed his name from Hesslein to “Harnad,”
then my mother‘s from (Jüdin) Süss to “Simoni”.
(Nor did it save them from having to go underground with a false identity in 1944.
And forty members of my family on both sides were exterminated.)
No, the fear and ambivalence of Hungarian Jewry was not because of 50 years of communism.
One lifetime in Hungary will do that for you,
or even just its aftermath.
Postscript:
Many years ago, in the 1970s, when I lived in Princeton and my brother was visiting, we went to a Hungarian bookstore in nearby New Bunswick (NJ) where there has been a Hungarian emigré community since the early 1900s). We shook hands with the owner, a Mr. Somodi, who immediately began to address us “per du” (tegezés), delighted to hear that Hungarians who had emigrated at a young age so long ago (1949) still spoke Hungarian.
(I remember that in browsing the books that was the first time I came across a book about the Scythian origins of Hungarian…)
Well, we got around to inquiring about Hungarian restaurants in New Brunswick “because there are quite a few Hungarians living in Princeton.”
He asked: “Really? Who are these Hungarians?”
I cited, as an example, Eugene Wigner (Wigner Jenő, a Nobel laureate).
I can still remember Somodi’s words, from 40 years ago (no need to translate them into English):
“Wigner? Hát az nem Magyar, az Zsidó!”
(Enlightened, by inference, about our likely ethnicity, I think he suspended the “per du,” and we suspended our browsing…)