The Kende Family

Before becoming a Jewish surname, Kende was a title. In the days when the Magyar tribes had not yet crossed the Carpathians, Hungarian royalty rested, according to sources, on a duality. The kende (or kündü) was one of the kings of the dual monarchy of the early Hungarians, alongside the gyula, the war leader. This distribution of powers corresponded to a division of functions: the kende's function is reputed to have been religious in nature — that of a "sacral prince."

The word itself has its roots in the languages of the steppe peoples. The modern Hungarian given name Kende, reactivated within the national movement, comes from the Hungarian royal title kende or kündü, which designated the ceremonial Magyar king — the one who reigned alongside the military leader, the gyula, in the period before the Magyars settled in Hungary. Onomastic studies trace the origin of the term to the Turkic world: the name Kende has Hungarian origins, serving as a title for the tribal chief of ancient times, more precisely the spiritual leader or high priest of the dual governing system of the early Magyars before their settlement in the Carpathian basin; the origin of the word very likely comes from the Turkic title *kündä, meaning "honored, revered."

Hungarian chronicle tradition moreover preserved the memory of a leader named Kond. Kond (Könd, Künd, Kund, Kend, Kende or Kurszán) was, according to the chronicler Anonymus, one of the seven chiefs of the Magyars who led the Hungarians toward the Carpathian basin. This distant echo — that of a name associated with the very foundation of the nation — is not without significance: when Hungarian Jewish families, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, chose to bear the name Kende, they claimed, consciously or not, the oldest of Magyar names, that of a sacred sovereignty. There is in this, from the outset, a lesson of mingled humility and audacity: to take as a surname a word that meant "the revered" was to affirm an unambiguous belonging to Hungarian soil.

That Jews bore the name Kende was no accident, but the result of a massive historical phenomenon: the transformation of Jewish surnames in Hungary in the nineteenth century. Wikidata lists Kende as an Ashkenazi surname of Hungarian linguistic origin, borne by Jewish personalities [Q62619402 — Wikidata]. The great reference dictionaries of Central and Eastern European Jewish names — those of Alexander Beider and Lars Menk — allow us to situate these surnames within the vast corpus of Ashkenazi Jewish names, between Germanic heritage, Slavic adaptation, and here, Hungarian adoption [A. Beider; L. Menk, Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames in Eastern Europe and Judeo-German, Avotaynu].

The underlying history is one of emancipation. Following the formation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungarian law opened the doors of citizenship to Jews. In 1867, in the wake of the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new Hungarian government emancipated all Jews on the territory, who obtained near-equality of rights with Hungarians — a regime that only France matched at that time. This emancipation had a decisive identity consequence: many Jews then chose to register themselves as Magyars, out of patriotic conviction.

Adopting a Hungarian name — replacing a German or Hebraicized surname with a name like Kende — was part of this movement. It meant inscribing in official records a desire for belonging, a will to share the destiny of a nation in construction. This gesture involves one of the most delicate dimensions of modern Jewish experience: the relationship to collectivity and to the host nation. Hungarian Jewish families who became Magyarized believed, with sincere loyalty, that they could be fully Jewish and fully Hungarian. The name Kende, borrowed from the founding kings, is its most eloquent emblem.

But history would reveal the fragility of this gamble, and the silences that flowed from it still haunt descendants. Among Hungarian Jewish families, such unspoken matters are commonplace. Honesty in the narrative demands that we recall it: the Magyarization of names was at once an act of trust and, in retrospect, a wound — for the nation to which one had given oneself turned, in the dark years, against its own.

If the Kende lineage has a documented face, it is that of Péter Kende, in French Pierre Kende, whose itinerary condenses a century of Hungarian Jewish history. Péter Kende — according to the usual order of names in Hungarian, Kende Péter — is a journalist, educator and Hungarian-French sociologist, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 1989. His birth is firmly attested: Péter Kende was born on December 26, 1927 in Budapest.

The Hungarian capital of the interwar period, where the young Kende grew up, was one of the great centers of European Jewish life — a brilliant community, largely assimilated, deeply engaged in the national press, sciences and culture. It was in this soil that the future sociologist's mind was formed. He attended university in Budapest between 1946 and 1948, then began working in the editorial office of a newspaper.

The young man entered the profession of words at the most perilous moment: that of communist control over postwar Hungary. In March 1947, he joined the team of the party's central daily, Szabad Nép ("Free People"), before becoming its foreign news editor. This trajectory at the heart of the said press apparatus says much about the hopes of a Jewish generation that, having survived the Shoah, placed its hopes for a time in the egalitarian promise of the new regime. Disillusionment would come quickly, and with it a requirement that runs through all of Kende's work: the quest for truth, that virtue which Judaism places at the foundation of the world, and which the journalist, then the scholar, never ceased to place before loyalty to institutions.

The year 1956 was, for Péter Kende as for Hungary, a watershed moment. The break with party orthodoxy was already underway. He became a supporter of the Imre Nagy line in 1953; in October 1954, he attacked the leaders and policies of the party leadership at a rebellious section meeting. This stance came at a cost: expelled from his newspaper, he had to continue his work elsewhere. In 1955, he was sidelined and found a new editorial position in Szeged.

Then came the uprising of autumn 1956. In 1956, as a journalist, he participated in the revolution, for which he subsequently took refuge in Paris, where he pursued his studies. The crushing of the insurrection by Soviet tanks precipitated his departure. To escape the wave of arrests, he left for Paris in 1957, where he obtained a doctorate in sociology and published several books and articles on East European socialism.

This exile made Péter Kende a link in an immemorial chain: that of Jews forced to rebuild their lives far from home, carrying knowledge with them as their sole inalienable homeland. The condition of the exile — the ger, the stranger whom Jewish Law commands to protect — became his condition. In France, a welcoming land, he reinvented himself as an intellectual, transforming rupture into a work. His Parisian life established itself in duration and recognition: according to the notices devoted to him, he is a political scientist and sociologist living in France since 1957, specialist in economic and political questions [Les libraires d'en haut; rev.hu]. Engagement in the life of the city, Hungarian as much as French, never left him.

From Paris, Péter Kende built a body of work as a sociologist and essayist where three loyalties intersect: to Hungary, to freedom, and to Jewish memory. Two of his works, preserved in the Zakhor corpus, mark its poles.

The first, Az én Magyarországom ("My Hungary"), expresses in its very title the unbreakable bond that the exile maintained with his native country [Zakhor corpus, ID 2c5465b0-9f71-4120-9f63-a6a98fdfec80]. This possessive — my Hungary — summarizes the entire fruitful ambivalence of a Hungarian Jewish intellectual: to claim a homeland that was his own, despite history, and to make it the object of critical reflection rather than resentment. Kende's work on the relations between nations and peoples of Central Europe runs through his entire later oeuvre, down to collections such as Nemzetek és népek Kelet-Közép-Európában ("Nations and Peoples in East-Central Europe") [hu.wikipedia.org].

The second work touches the heart of our subject. Zsidóság az 1945 utáni Magyarországon ("Jewishness in Hungary after 1945") was published in 1984 in Paris, in the Magyar Füzetek collection [Zakhor corpus, ID 6bd49762-2865-4d5e-b45b-0aff13cced56]. This simple editorial fact is itself a manifesto: it was from exile, in a Hungarian-language Hungarian publishing house established in Paris — the Magyar Füzetek, a home of free Hungarian thought in emigration — that a Jewish intellectual undertook to think through what Hungarian Jewishness was after the catastrophe. To address the Jewish question head-on in post-1945 Hungary, even as the communist regime shrouded it in silence, was precisely to break through the veil of unsaid things that Hungarian Jewish family memory had learned to maintain. Here, archive and Memory answer one another: the historian Kende puts into words, through analysis, what so many families kept silent.

In this approach we find one of the highest virtues of the tradition of Israel: the duty of memory, zakhor, "remember." In choosing to write the history of a wounded community rather than let it sink into oblivion, Péter Kende accomplishes, as a sociologist, a gesture that the sages held sacred. His bilingual work — Hungarian and French, as evidenced by his essay Le défi hongrois. De Trianon à Bruxelles, published in Paris in 2004 — makes him a bridge-builder between two cultures and the guardian of a threatened memory [hu.wikipedia.org].

Tying the threads together

We must now tie the threads together. What does it mean that an Ashkenazi Jewish lineage bore, in Hungary, the name of the legendary Magyar founding kings? The answer reads itself in the superposition of two memories.

On one side, Hungarian memory: that of a sacral title, the kende, associated with the origins of the nation and with one of its seven legendary chiefs. On the other, Jewish memory: that of a people who, from the destruction of the Temple to the ghettos of Central Europe, learned to make of each host land a provisional homeland, while keeping intact its loyalty to itself. To adopt the name Kende was, for a Jewish family, to attempt the impossible and magnificent synthesis of these two heritages: to be fully of Hungary without ceasing to be of Israel.

The destiny of Péter Kende reveals the truth of this tension. Emancipated in 1867, part of Hungarian Jews registered themselves as Magyars by patriotic conviction; then came the time when this loyalty was betrayed, and when silence covered the families. Péter Kende's work—writing My Hungary from exile, thinking Jewishness after 1945—is a man's answer to this wound: neither renunciation of Hungary nor forgetting of Jewishness, but lucidity held on both sides. In this, the Kende lineage partakes of an experience shared by the entire Central European diaspora, whose history was that of ardent integration followed by tragic awakening, and reconstruction through knowledge.

Historical prudence is called for here. In the absence of continuous family archives, one cannot trace a certain descent linking all bearers of the name. What can be established is the meaning of a name, the historical movement that bore it toward Jewish families, and the exemplary embodiment that a documented figure gave to it. The rest belongs to the realm of the probable and the transmitted, which it would be dishonest to harden into certainty.

The Kende lineage bears a name that is, in itself, a condensation of history: that of a sacred royalty from Magyar origins, taken up by Jewish families at the moment when Hungary opened its doors to them. From the emancipation of 1867 to the revolution of 1956, from Budapest to Paris, this name traversed the great hopes and great catastrophes of Central European Judaism.

Among all the virtues of the tradition of Israel, it is knowledge placed at the service of memory and truth that this lineage will have, in its most documented figure, best expressed. Péter Kende — set aside for having spoken what he thought, exiled for having taken part in freedom, become since Paris one of the great analysts of his nation and one of the rare few to dare to think Hungarian Jewry after the Shoah — embodies the commandment of zakhor, "remember." He made of exile not an end, but an observation post; of silence, not a resignation, but an object of study; of double belonging, not a sterile tearing, but a work.

Thus the Kende lineage, in a single name, speaks of the adventure of a people: fidelity to a homeland, the trial of betrayal, and survival through thought. It is in this that its singular history joins the collective memory of Israel, which through the centuries and continents has made study and remembrance its most certain strongholds.