Variations in attitudes towards Jews in contemporary Hungarian society

Abstract

The paper reports on the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in October 2023 using a nationally representative sample of 1,000 people aimed at exploring Hungarian society’s attitudes towards people categorised as Jews. The traditional anti-Semitism questionnaire first used by Adorno and his colleagues contains mostly negative statements regarding Jews, which triggers the so called yes-effect and increases the proportion of those who agree with anti-Jewish statements. To filter out the yes-effect, we included anti-Jewish and pro-Jewish statements in our questionnaire in equal proportions. In this way, we were able to separate the consistent respondents who, if they were anti-Semitic, agreed with the anti-Jewish statements and disagreed with the positive statements about Jews, or, if they were Philo-Semites, agreed with the statements sympathetic to Jews and disagreed with the anti-Jewish statements. By performing a cluster analysis, we found that we see consistent anti-Semitic and Philo-Semitic response patterns in the case of a minority of those interviewed. The majority gave inconsistent answers or did not agree with any of the statements, regardless of whether they were anti-Jewish or pro-Jewish statements; this intermediate field could be typed using cluster analysis, however.