The Erdélyi Family

Understanding the surname Erdélyi requires tracing it back to its geographical source. Transylvania — Erdély in Hungarian, Siebenbürgen in German, Ardeal in Romanian — constitutes a hinge region of Central Europe, long integrated into the Kingdom of Hungary, then erected as an autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before being reincorporated into the domains of the Habsburgs. This tumultuous history shaped a linguistic and confessional melting pot where Hungarians, Saxons, Sicules, Romanians, Armenians, and Jews coexisted.

The suffix -i in Hungarian marks geographical origin or belonging: thus Budapesti ("from Budapest"), Debreceni ("from Debrecen"), Szegedi ("from Szeged"). Erdélyi follows exactly this mechanism: it designates one who comes from Erdély [Q56538314 — Wikidata]. This type of patronymic formation based on a toponym of provenance is universal in European onomastics, and particularly frequent among Jewish names, where the mobility of communities often made place of origin the most stable identity marker. The major reference dictionaries by Alexander Beider and Lars Menk devoted to surnames of Eastern European Jews and Judeo-German extensively document this logic: a large part of Israelite family names from the Austro-Hungarian realm derives from names of cities, towns, or regions [Dictionaries of Eastern European Jewish and Judeo-German Surnames].

It is important to emphasize here an essential methodological nuance: a patronym derived from a toponym does not necessarily indicate that the family resided there at the time of the name's adoption. On the contrary, the demonym frequently designates one who is no longer in place — it is by leaving Erdély that one becomes, in the eyes of others, the Erdélyi, the Transylvanian. The name is thus often the fossil of a displacement: it fixes a provenance at the moment when it ceases to be local evidence. For Jews of central Hungary or the northwestern part of the realm, bearing the name Erdélyi could thus signal a migration from the eastern Carpathian region toward the major centers, Pest in particular.

It must be noted, contrary to this general migratory pattern, the singular case of Lajos Erdélyi, born in 1929 in Marosvásárhely — Târgu Mureș in Romanian — a town in Transylvania itself. In his case, the name is not the fossil trace of an exodus: it coincides instead with the geographical reality it articulates. The Transylvanian is called Erdélyi because he is, effectually, from Transylvania. This coincidence between the patronym and the actual land confers on his trajectory a rare onomastic coherence, and invites consideration that certain branches of the lineage have preserved, over the centuries, a continuous rootedness in the region whose name is their name.

The Jewish presence in Transylvania and the Carpathian basin extends over a long duration. While medieval settlements there were more dispersed than in the Rhineland or Polish lands, the Ashkenazi Jewry that subsequently nourished Hungary proceeds directly from the religious and intellectual world of medieval Ashkenaz. The work of Ephraim Kanarfogel has demonstrated the richness and coherence of medieval Ashkenazi rabbinical culture, whose structures of thought, methods of study, and pious practices transmitted themselves eastward through the course of migrations [Kanarfogel, 2013]. Similarly, the research of Elisheva Baumgarten on everyday piety has illuminated the concrete texture of religious life — gestures, observances, relations between men and women — that constituted the framework of Ashkenazi communities before their diffusion into the eastern margins of the Empire [Baumgarten, 2014].

This continuity is not merely spiritual. Jeffrey Woolf has analyzed the way in which Ashkenazi communities constituted themselves as "sacred communities," endowed with institutions, courts, and a juridical autonomy that traveled with them [Woolf, 2015]. When Jewish families established themselves in the towns and cities of Transylvania and Upper Hungary, they imported this communal model, with its kehillot, its rabbis, and its halakhic norms. The essays of Haym Soloveitchik have moreover underscored the centrality of custom — the minhag — in the transmission of Ashkenazi identity, which illuminates the fidelity that Hungarian communities subsequently manifested toward their traditions [Soloveitchik, 2014].

On the economic plane, Michael Toch has shown that the image of a medieval Jewry devoted solely to lending is largely to be reconstructed: Jews participated in diversified commercial, artisanal, and landed circuits, and their insertion into the economy varied greatly according to regions and periods [Toch, 2013]. In the Carpathian space, where urbanization was less pronounced, Jewish families often played a role as intermediaries between the noble domains, rural markets, and commercial routes connecting Poland, Moldavia, and the Pannonian plain. It is in this mobile world, made of small centers and extended family networks, that the provenances were forged which later surnames would crystallize.

Marosvásárhely, the native city of Lajos Erdélyi, counted before the Second World War a vigorous Jewish community, embedded for generations in the economy and cultural life of the city. This community carried within itself all the tensions characteristic of Transylvanian Jewry: between Orthodox fidelity and openness to modernity, between a claimed Hungarian identity and awareness of a specific Jewish belonging. That the Erdélyi family issued from it confirms, at least for this branch, the reality of an ancient Transylvanian rootedness, prior to any strategy of nominal assimilation.

One cannot understand Hungarian Jewish identity, from which a name like Erdélyi derives, without evoking the religious matrix that structured it in the modern period. The work of Maoz Kahana, tracing the passage "from Prague to Pressburg," has shed light on how legal and halakhic creativity transformed in a changing world, between the great centers of learning in Bohemia and the emergence of Pressburg (Pozsony, today Bratislava) as the spiritual capital of Hungarian Jewry [Kahana, 2015]. Pressburg, seat of the famous yeshiva founded by the Hatam Sofer at the beginning of the nineteenth century, became the bastion of an orthodoxy that durably marked the identity of Hungarian Jews.

This religious history is not mere backdrop. It determined the internal divisions that ran through Magyar Jewry at the very moment when hereditary surnames were becoming generalized and linguistic assimilation was beginning. The tension between fidelity to tradition and openness to modernity—between scrupulous observance documented by historians of the halakha and the forces of civil emancipation—structured the trajectory of thousands of families. The rabbinical diaries studied by Edward Fram, such as those of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim in Frankfurt, give a striking picture of daily life in a Central European Ashkenazi community at the end of the eighteenth century: conflicts, contracts, marriages, disputes, all traces of a dense communal life that one can, by analogy, transpose to the Hungarian kehillot of the same period [Fram, 2012].

The ambivalent figure of the "Court Jew" deserves mention here, for it illustrates the singular conditions of Jewish insertion into Central European societies. Yair Mintzker, in his analysis of the sensational trial of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, showed the fragility of these positions of influence, where proximity to princely power exposed one to fortune as to catastrophe [Mintzker, 2017]. Complementarily, Daniel Jutte explored the "economy of secrets" that bound Jews and Christians in premodern Europe, revealing spaces of interaction and negotiation far more subtle than the historiography of exclusion alone suggests [Jutte, 2015]. These works remind us that the Jewishness from which the name Erdélyi proceeds evolved in a world where belonging, provenance, and status were in perpetual renegotiation.

The Jewish cemeteries that Lajos Erdélyi would photograph decades later are themselves the silent witnesses of this dense communal life. In these enclosures, the tombstones bear the hereditary family names that appeared from the late eighteenth century onward—Erdélyi among others—and the Hebrew formulas carved in stone remind us that the halakha continued to structure the relationship to death, memory, and community, long after the language of daily life had become Hungarian or Romanian. The gravestone is thus the document where one can still read, superimposed, the Hebrew given name and the Magyar surname, religious identity and national identity. It is precisely this superposition that Lajos Erdélyi chose to preserve through photography, with the awareness of a man who knew what these names had cost their bearers.

The decisive moment for a surname like Erdélyi lies at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Habsburg monarchy imposed on Jews the adoption of hereditary family names. The Josephine Edict of 1787 obliged Jews of Austrian and Hungarian lands to bear a fixed and transmissible surname, ending the traditional system of filiation by Hebrew patronymic ("X son of Y"). It was within this administrative framework that many Jewish families received or chose names, among which the dictionaries of Beider and Menk record a multitude of toponymic and Germanic forms [Dictionaries of East European and Judeo-German Jewish Surnames].

The case of Erdélyi, however, presents a specificity: its form is not Germanic but Magyar. Now the massive adoption of Hungarian names by Jews resulted less from the 1787 edict than from a later movement, that of the magyarization of surnames, which culminated in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the full civil emancipation granted to Jews of Hungary in 1867, in the wake of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. From then on, the adoption of a Magyar name — whether it was a matter of translating a German name, or choosing a Hungarian toponym like Erdélyi — became a gesture of patriotic affirmation and national integration. The context of this renaissance of Jewish identities in Central Europe, between Magyar national affirmation and distinctive cultural vitality, was finely analyzed by Delphine Bechtel in her study of the Jewish cultural renaissance [Bechtel, 2002].

Here, family tradition and the archival record answer one another without always fully confirming each other, hence the register of intersection. The transmitted memory would often like a name like Erdélyi to attest to an ancient and continuous Transylvanian origin; onomastic analysis invites greater caution. The name could just as well result from a late assimilationist choice, made by a family eager to adopt a euphonious Magyar surname, without direct connection to residence in Transylvania. The two hypotheses — actual provenance and symbolic adoption — are not mutually exclusive, and only a nominative archival search, register by register, would allow us to settle the matter for a given lineage.

The branch represented by Lajos Erdélyi partially escapes this uncertainty: born in Marosvásárhely, in the very heart of Transylvania, his family bore a name that corresponded exactly to its place of origin. Whether this surname was the result of deliberate magyarization or of an older memorial rootedness, it is certain that by the generation of Lajos, born in 1929, the family was fully Transylvanian, in name as in fact. Integration into the Hungarian-speaking community of Romania was complete: to be Erdélyi in Marosvásárhely was to be at home in a country which, since the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, had changed states without changing cities.

The surname Erdélyi also tells a story of languages. Before assimilation, the vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews in Hungary was Yiddish, a language whose history Jean Baumgarten traced as that of a "wandering language," vector of a rich and autonomous diasporic culture [Baumgarten, 2002]. The shift from Yiddish to Hungarian — and the correlative adoption of Magyar names — constitutes one of the most visible markers of the transformation of Hungarian Jews into "Hungarian Israelites" in the nineteenth century.

This linguistic shift was neither uniform nor without tension. In eastern regions, in Transylvania and the Subcarpathian region, Yiddish remained vibrant far longer than in the assimilated circles of Budapest. Hungarian Jewry thus found itself pulled between several poles: an orthodoxy attached to tradition and often to Yiddish, a "Neologue" reformist and Hungarian-speaking Judaism, and all the intermediate nuances. Delphine Bechtel showed that this period of cultural renaissance was traversed by intense reflection on language, literature, and the construction of national identities, within which Jews played a leading role [Bechtel, 2002].

The adoption of a name like Erdélyi inscribes itself precisely within this dynamic. By substituting a Judeo-German patronym with a transparent Magyar demonym, a family signified its adherence to the Hungarian nation while preserving, through the very meaning of the name, a trace of its geography of origin. The name thus became a palimpsest: beneath the Magyar form the Transylvanian provenance emerges, and beneath the Transylvanian provenance, the long Ashkenazi memory of a world shaped by Yiddish and rabbinic tradition. To understand Erdélyi, one must thus read simultaneously these three layers — Hebraic and religious, Yiddish and communal, Hungarian and national.

Lajos Erdélyi lived within this linguistic in-between with particular acuity. Journalist in cultural journals of the Hungarian minority in Romania, he wrote in Hungarian in a Romanian country, on Jewish subjects, for a public that defined itself by the language of its Magyarized ancestors. His books appeared in Bucharest in Hungarian. This triple belonging — Jewish, Hungarian, Romanian — is not an accidental paradox but the structural condition of a lineage whose name alone speaks its complexity: Erdélyi, the Transylvanian, in a world where Transylvania had successively been Hungarian, Turkish, Austrian, Hungarian again, Romanian, reannexed by Budapest in 1940, then Romanian definitively after 1945.

It was in the twentieth century that the Erdélyi lineage emerged from the anonymity of the archives to take on a face and a body of work. Lajos Erdélyi was born on May 17, 1929, in Marosvásárhely — Târgu Mureș in Romanian — in a Jewish family of Northern Transylvania. His childhood unfolded in a lively provincial town, a crossroads of Hungarian, Romanian, and Jewish cultures, until the political upheavals of the Second World War shattered this world. In 1940, the Second Vienna Award annexed Northern Transylvania to Hungary, placing the Erdélyi family under Hungarian jurisdiction and, consequently, under the dominion of Hungarian antisemitic laws. Four years later, in 1944, when Lajos was only sixteen years old, his entire family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

His mother Helén and his sister Jalia were murdered upon arrival. He and his father were sent for forced labor in Silesia, where they spent long months at the Dörnhau camp, an annex of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, subjected to the hardest work in the mines. The possibility of remaining together — father and son, in the midst of catastrophe — was one of the rare mercies in an otherwise absolute hell. They were liberated in May 1945 and returned to Marosvásárhely, which had become Romanian again. It was there that Lajos met, within a Zionist youth movement, the woman who would become his wife, Anni, originally from Czernowitz — another crossroads city of Central European Jewry. He first believed in the ideals of communism, but the reality of Romanian dictatorship quickly imposed upon him a bitter lucidity.

He found his calling as a photojournalist, working in the editorial offices of cultural journals of the Hungarian minority in Romania. It was in this context that he developed, from the 1970s onward, what would become the vocation of his entire second life: photographing the abandoned Jewish cemeteries of Eastern Europe. This choice is not without significance. It must be read as, at once, a form of filial piety toward the dead without graves — his mother and sister have no identifiable burial place —, an acute awareness that these stone enclosures are the last vestiges of entire disappeared communities, and a conviction that collective Jewish memory also passes through the preservation of material traces left in the earth. The gravestone, in Jewish tradition — matzevah — is the permanent testimony addressed to the living: by photographing it before it collapses, Lajos Erdélyi accomplishes an act of zikaron, of memory, which extends in image what stone can no longer long hold upright.

In 1980, he published in Bucharest Régi zsidó temetők művészete — "The Art of Ancient Jewish Cemeteries" — a photographic album and study that revealed to the world the aesthetic and symbolic richness of these necropolises often abandoned since the Shoah. The work was pioneering: it established, in the stifling context of Ceaușescu's Romania, the legitimacy of a Jewish perspective on Jewish heritage, and reached a wide international audience. It made Lajos Erdélyi one of the first systematic documentarians of Eastern European Jewish funerary heritage, in a field where almost no one had yet placed an objective lens with such rigor and scope.

In 1988, life under Romanian communist dictatorship became unbearable. Lajos Erdélyi and his wife left Marosvásárhely for Budapest, thus joining a migratory movement that had brought many Hungarian-speaking Jews from Romania back to the banks of the Danube. In Budapest, he continued his work with undiminished energy, went on photographing cemeteries, gave lectures, bore witness. Over the years, he became one of the most sought-after and most respected witnesses of the Shoah, notably in Germany, where the Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe invited him on several occasions.

In 2006, his memoirs appeared, Túlélés, egy fotográfus visszaemlékezése — "Surviving: A Photographer's Memories" — reissued in an expanded edition in 2012. This book is at once the account of a survival and the testimony of a commitment: Lajos recounts in it Auschwitz, Dörnhau, the return, the meeting with Anni, the decades spent photographing what the war had sought to erase. Memory is here an act of resistance, and photography, an instrument of justice. The memoirs were translated into German and published by the Berlin Memorial Foundation, contributing to making known to German-speaking audiences the trajectory of a Transylvanian survivor whose name speaks, for three syllables, of where he came from.

Lajos Erdélyi passed away on March 23, 2020, in Budapest, at the age of ninety. His photographic archive — thousands of photographs of Jewish cemeteries throughout Eastern Europe, from Romania to Poland, from Hungary to Ukraine — is deposited at the Hungarian Jewish Museum (MILEV) in Budapest, where it was made available online in 2024, finally enabling worldwide access to this exceptional visual heritage. This posthumous legacy is perhaps the most eloquent of monuments a person can leave behind: not his own, but that of the thousands of unknown people whose final trace he preserved.

In contemporary times, Erdélyi has become a widespread surname in Hungary, borne by both Jewish and non-Jewish families — the Jewish portion being precisely what the onomastic data assembled by Wikidata [Q56538314 — Wikidata] documents. This ambivalence is nothing exceptional: the Magyarization of names had the intended effect of rendering certain Jewish surnames indistinguishable from their Christian equivalents, dissolving the confessional marker into a shared national identity. The name Erdélyi illustrates this success — and this fragility — of assimilation: a surname so perfectly Magyar that it ceases to signal, in itself, a Jewish belonging.

Yet this indistinction harbors a historical tragedy. The effort at integration that the adoption of a Hungarian name symbolized offered no protection to Jewish families from the persecutions of the twentieth century. Lisa Silverman demonstrated, for the Austro-German space of the interwar period, how Jewish identity remained constructed and assigned, independent of individual assimilation strategies [Silverman, 2012]. Hungarian Jewry, among the most assimilated and Magyarized in Europe, was struck directly by the Shoah in 1944. The name Erdélyi, like so many other Magyar surnames borne by Jews, crossed this catastrophe: some bearers disappeared in the camps, others survived — like Lajos and his father — to pass the name on to subsequent generations, in Hungary as in the diasporas born of emigration.

The itinerary of Lajos Erdélyi exemplifies in a striking manner the dispersion characteristic of Hungarian Jewish lineages after 1945. Born in Marosvásárhely, become Romanian without moving, emigrated to Budapest in the second half of his life, translated into German, exhibited in Berlin, his archives deposited in Budapest and accessible from around the world: each of these stages corresponds to one of the geographical and political fractures of the twentieth century. The name Erdélyi, "the Transylvanian," thus designates, in its contemporary posterity, a man for whom Transylvania was the homeland of origin but whom history made a citizen of several worlds.

Today, the surname is encountered as readily in Hungary as in Israel, in America and Western Europe, among the descendants of Hungarian Jews scattered by the upheavals of the century. Each Erdélyi lineage possesses its own history, which a methodical genealogical inquiry — founded on civil registers, censuses and communal archives — alone can reconstitute with certainty. The present work, now enriched by the figure of Lajos Erdélyi, will have attempted to illuminate the framework within which all these particular histories are inscribed: that of a name which says, in three Magyar syllables, the provenance, the memory and the hope of integration of a Central European Jewry.

The surname Erdélyi reveals itself, at the end of this inquiry, as an exemplary distillation of the history of Central European Jews. Its form — a Magyar gentilé derived from the name of Transylvania, Erdély — anchors it in the Carpathian geography, while its adoption by Jewish families ties it to the great movement of magyarization of names that accompanied the emancipation of 1867 [Q56538314 — Wikidata]. Beneath this Hungarian surface lie older strata: the rabbinical culture of medieval Ashkenaz [Kanarfogel, 2013], the daily piety of communities [Baumgarten, 2014], the religious world that ran from Prague to Pressburg [Kahana, 2015], and the long trajectory of Yiddish as the language of the diaspora [Baumgarten, 2002].

It is, however, in the life and work of Lajos Erdélyi, born in Marosvásárhely in 1929 and died in Budapest in 2020, that all these strata find their fullest incarnation. A survivor of Auschwitz and Dörnhau, he could have remained silent. He could have, like so many others, left behind the weight of the catastrophe and melted into modernity. He chose the opposite: to return, with a camera, to trace what had been destroyed, and to publish in Bucharest in 1980 Régi zsidó temetők művészete, and then, twenty-six years later, to tell his own survival in Túlélés, egy fotográfus visszaemlékezése. These two works form a diptych: the first is turned toward the dead, the second toward the living that he was nonetheless. Together, they constitute an act of zikaron — of memory — in the most demanding sense of the Jewish tradition: not passive commemoration, but the active transmission of what risks disappearing.

We have distinguished, throughout this work, what the archive establishes and what tradition transmits. That the name means "the Transylvanian" is established by linguistic analysis and reference works on onomastics [Dictionaries of surnames of Jews in Eastern Europe and Judeo-German]. That every Erdélyi family is descended from an actual Transylvanian migration is only probable, sometimes conjectured: the name could also result from a choice of symbolic assimilation. But for the branch represented by Lajos Erdélyi, the Transylvanian rootedness is an established fact, and the commemorative vocation is a documented fact.

Among all the values and virtues that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, the Erdélyi lineage will have, among all, best expressed that of zikaron — memory as a moral act and as collective responsibility. Not memory as nostalgia, but as obligation toward the dead and as a gift to the living. Lajos Erdélyi made this value the guiding thread of an entire life: that of a man who could have forgotten and who chose to testify, of a photographer who could have photographed the future and who chose to preserve the traces of the past, of a survivor who could have remained silent and whose archive, deposited in the Jewish Museum of Budapest, still speaks. In doing so, he inscribes himself in the longest tradition of Israel: that of the keepers of memory, of the scribes and archivists who, generation after generation, have transmitted the names of the dead so that the living may know where they come from.

It is now up to each lineage to extend this Great Book through patient research of its own archives, so that the name may recover, behind its Magyar form, the faces of the men and women who bore it — and so that the stele, even if photographed, may never be quite a silent stone.