The Foundational Dilemmas of Jenő Lévai: On the Birth of Hungarian Holocaust Historiography during the 1940s

This article studies the beginnings of Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre) in Hungary during the second half of the 1940s by focusing on the oeuvre of Jenő Lévai, a crucial pioneer of the field. The article provides brief overviews of the contents of Lévai's major works, analyzing his stances on key interpretative questions as well as his use of sources. It argues that Lévai's impressive series of journalistic-scholarly works from the immediate postwar years not only addressed a host of themes that have been repeatedly studied since, but several of the interpretative dilemmas he first raised have continued to preoccupy historians of the Holocaust in Hungary until the present day.