Today's Washington Post features a fascinating and revelatory story by James McAuley that illuminates the growing relationship between the Hasidic sect Chabad and the operationally anti-Semitic regime of Hungary’s Victor Orban. (“Operationally” because it’s not apparent that Orban is personally anti-Semitic, but abundantly apparent that he has resurrected a host of anti-Semitic tropes—most particularly, in his ongoing attacks on George Soros—in order to consolidate his support among the largely rural Hungarians who make up his electoral base.) A passing reference in the article also points to Chabad’s hitherto unheralded support for shareholder capitalism—file under “Who knew?”
At issue is Orban's desire to construct a Hungarian Holocaust museum that largely omits Hungary's long history of anti-Semitism in recounting the murder of roughly 400,000 Hungarian Jews in 1944, when the Nazis took more direct control of the nation from their wartime ally, Hungary's anti-Semitic ruler Miklos Horthy, whose reputation Orban has sought to rehabilitate. After first entrusting the museum project to Maria Schmidt, who resolutely downplayed Hungarian anti-Semitism, Orban was compelled to let her go. Now, he's restarted the project under Chabad Rabbi Slomo Koves, a staunch Orban supporter who repeatedly has turned a blind eye to Orban's anti-Semitic electoral appeals. Koves points out that Orban has aggressively supported the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hungary's largely secular Jewish population has long accused Orban of cozying up to Chabad as a way of mitigating his ongoing invocation of anti-Semitic themes.
Part of Orban's cozying up was his selection of Chabad to take over a small, failing Budapest college, which Chabad then renamed Milton Friedman University. How the father of shareholder capitalism became a Hasidic icon is a good question—probably, Chabad was groping to find a Hungarian-descended Jew with beliefs in accord with Eastern Europe's New Right. Or could it be that Chabad believed some biblical passage actually disparages workers and the environment, and pronounces the share buyback to be a devotional rite?
