Page - 379 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

379Coping with Enlightenments qualified student of themes in Hungarian history and language, emerging as crucial to contemporary discourses of identity. During his lifetime, “language became ideology” in the Kingdom of Hungary—or at least firmly on its track toward achieving such a status129—and the historical study of language was generally consolidating its authority as an indispensable branch of the “sci- ences of man,” whose emergence itself was central to the reorientation of the map of knowledge in the eighteenth century. From this point of view, he may be perceived as responding to developments in the sciences and in the public domain with special sensitivity, but in lack of explicit evidence, one could only speculate as to the extent to which he saw these changes happening. If he did, he may also have realized that there could be political benefits for him in going along. In the post-1773 status quo, when changing circumstances favored the amplification of Hell’s Hungarus commitments, his studies devoted to central issues of the genesis of the Hungarian “patria” could have served to consolidate his credentials as a “patriot,” and smoothly dovetailed with his efforts to pro- mote the progress of science in the realm. This would seem like a highly ingenious and potentially promising combi- nation of flexibility in intellectual endeavors (based on open-mindedness and curiosity), and adaptability in social brokerage. Still, in the end Hell was fight- ing an uphill battle. It is true that in strictly academic circles the theory ad- vanced in the Demonstratio was almost invariably welcomed in Hungary too. As we saw, even Pray felt compelled to modify his earlier views on the subject. It must also be added that the only linguist to champion the alternative con- cept in Sajnovics’s and Hell’s lifetime, the eccentric itinerant scholar György Kalmár (1726–c.1782), published his relevant work nearly simultaneously with the Demonstratio, so it could not have been a response to it.130 In other words, the issue here was not (yet) that of an academic debate,131 the more so as con- temporary scholars used the terms “linguistic family” or “linguistic kinship,” if 129 István Margócsy, “When Language Became Ideology: Hungary and the Eighteenth Cen- tury,” in Almási and Šubarić, Latin at the Crossroads, 25–34. 130 György Kalmár, Prodromus idiomatis Schytico­ Mogorico­ Chuno­ (seu Hunno­ ) Avarici, sive adparatus criticus ad linguam Hungaricam (Bratislava, 1770). Cf. Zoltán Éder, “Újabb szempontok a Demonstratio hazai fogadtatásának kérdéséhez,” in Éder, Túl a Duna­ tájon: Fejezetek a magyar művelődéstörténet európai kapcsolatai köréből (Budapest: Mundus, 1999), 47–61, here 49. 131 This somewhat revisionist view of Hungarian scholarship on the subject is summarized, with references to the now extensive literature, in Réka Lőrinczi, “Megjegyzések és adalékok a finnugor nyelvrokonítás fogadtatásához,” Nyelvtudományi Közélemények 97 (2000): 261–72. During the subsequent century, however, a veritable “Ugrian-Turkic war” gradually unfolded and culminated in the 1860–70s, among linguists and ethnographers, in which the notions of linguistic, cultural, and genetic affinity and kinship became in- creasingly confounded.