Képviselőház és nemzetgyűlés, 1861-1944: Elnöki és általános iratok

The Lower House of the Hungarian Parliament was a centrally important stage for debates about the political behaviour, socioeconomic position and legal status of Jews in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Hungarian Parliament was responsible for worsening anti-Semitic legislation in these years that gradually withdrew Jewish emancipation. The opinion that gained the upper hand in the parliamentary debates viewed Jews as a group opposed to the interests Hungariandom and was to define Jewry as a racial entity. The laws enacted gravely restricted the opportunities of Jewish citizens and increasingly excluded them from Hungarian society and the economic life of the country. Most (in)famously, anti-Semitic legislation took the form the first anti-Jewish law in 1938 (law XV. of 1938), the second anti-Jewish law of 1939 (law IV. of 1939), the racial law banning marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews from 1941 (law XV. of 1941), the law on the status of Judaism withdrawing the full state recognition and support it enjoyed since the late 19th century (law VIII. of 1942) and the fourth anti-Jewish law that aimed to exclude Jews from the agricultural sphere (law XV. of 1942). The Parliament was also the scene of even more radical proposals during the implementation of the Holocaust just outside the borders of the country in 1942-43, including that the Jewish population of Hungary should be deported. All these laws were debated in Parliament with significant differences between representatives of various parties and a first supportive and later critical stance of the major Christian churches of Hungary (the latter was articulated especially in the Upper House though). The plethora of anti-Semitic laws and decrees adopted in the late 1930s and early 1940s were to pave the way for the major events of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944.