foundational dilemmas of Jeno Levai: on the birth of Hungarian Holocaust historiography in the 1940s

This article studies the beginnings of Holocaust historiography in Hungary during the 2nd half of the 1940s by focusing on the oeuvre of Jeno Levai, a pioneer of the field. The article provides brief overviews of the contents of Levai's major work, analyzing his stances on key interpretive questions as well as his use of sources. It argues that Levai'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 interpretive dilemmas he first raised have continued to preoccupy historians of the Holocaust in Hungary until the present day.