Seite - 386 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 8386 nurtures the Lapp with a nature that cannot keep him alive under any, more pliant climate. In Hungary, Lapps would all die. If the writer was so familiar with the language that he formed a judgment about it, it is a pity that he forgot about these features of the nations, which could have placed the matter in a clearer light.150 It has been pointed out that Bessenyei closely follows Vaissète in his descrip- tion of the Sámi.151 But the vocabulary employed by him (“ghastly,” “ugly,” “sub- terranean mole”) replaces rather passionate disparagement for the attempted scholarly detachment of Enlightenment philosophical-scientific texts: the ele- ment of “othering” one regularly finds in such texts about Sámi as a primitive nation (similarly to other “savage” societies) becomes radicalized under the impact of the politically inspired vantage point of the Hungarian nobleman. Unlike in the case of the steppe barbarians, where “savagery” is developed and accentuated as a condition of a propensity to freedom, any potential of Sámi savages to be recognized as “noble” is relentlessly suppressed by Bessenyei.152 Questioning the Hun–Scythian ancestry of Hungarians, the cornerstone of both national dignity and old liberties, with reference to the Hungarian–Sámi linguistic kinship almost inevitably invited passionate rejection—ironically, even from figures who, like Bessenyei, otherwise demonstrated an awareness 150 Bessenyei, Prózai munkák, 1802–1804, 233. 151 Penke, Filozofikus világtörténetek, 65 152 This is not the place to delve into the further intricacies of the reception of the Demon­ stratio. Several scholars have emphasized that outright hostility to “Finno-(Lappo)-Ugri- anism” was confined to a minority, and the dominant feeling was perplexity (resulting in strange hybrid theories). See László Szörényi, “Nyelvrokonság, őstörténet és epika a 18. századi magyarországi jezsuita latin irodalomban,” Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 101, nos. 1–2 (1997): 16–24; István Margócsy, “A tiszta magyar: Nemzetkarakterológia és nemze- ti történelem összefüggései Bessenyei és kortársai nyelvrokonság-felfogásában,” in A szétszórt rendszer Tanulmányok Bessenyei György életművéről, ed. Csaba Csorba and Klára Margócsy (Nyíregyháza: Bessenyei Kiadó, 1998), 131–40.The fluctuation of the Habsburg– Hungarian relationship is a factor to consider in this regard. The retorts of Barcsay and Orczy date from a period in which the initial perplexity over Sajnovics’s theory spilled over into consternation under the impact of the post-1765 disaffection with Vienna. True, there were more neutral voices already in the Josephian period, when relations were alto- gether also far from cordial, culminating in the conflation of Sámi, Finns, Huns, Scythians, and Hungarians—locating them all in the “empire of Karelia”—in the novels and plays of András Dugonics (1740–1818). But it is noteworthy that Bessenyei’s most relevant state- ment on the subject was conceived in a period when the 1794 Hungarian “Jacobin conspiracy” had resulted in several executions and a wave of imprisonments (Bessenyei himself was also suspect), and the new, unenlightened absolutism of Francis I under- standably provoked retrenchment.