During the years 1765–1767, there was serious peasant unrest in Transdanubian Hungary, a region where large estates owned by a few prominent families such as the Esterházy, Batthány, and Festetics were prevalent. Especially in Vas, Zala, and Somogy counties, located in western Hungary across the border from Styria, peasant inhabitants protested the growing demands for services and other payments placed upon them by landlords eager to increase the income produced by their lands. No uniform standards existed; both the size of peasant land holdings and the obligations attached to these holdings varied markedly, determined by various contracts or, more often, by custom.

Since about 1880 there has been a significant change in the way we talk about art and music, and, in particular, the way art and music are spoken about in academic institutions. We now largely undertake studies of art and music under the rubric of historical style and use the category of style as a limiting concept, both temporal and technical, to explain, evaluate, and understand the work of art. One particular sense of style, which may be described as the structural-historical, came to prominence at the end of the last century as the result of attempts by art and music historians to carve out for themselves an interpretive, social, and institutional space atop that Olympus of academia, the German—here specifically the Viennese—Universität.

A paradox inspires the following paper. Hungary was one of three East European countries which, between the great wars, contained at once large peasant and large Jewish populations. The others were Poland and Romania, where, in both, the record is clear enough: the peasants can be said to have disliked the Jews. In Hungary things were not so simple.