The paper was introduced by a short historical survey of Jewry in Hungary from Roman times until 1944, when a great part of the Jews was displaced and annihilated. Attention was called to three aspects of their musical traditions.

1. (1) Their liturgical service representing a local fusion of the Ashkenazic rite of Eastern Middle Europe, which since the middle of the nineteenth century was supplanted by the so-called Sulzerian Viennese reform-liturgy.

2. (2) The family ceremonies in which Jewry preserved many more original traits, fairly rich local variants, peculiar lection- and blessing-types, archaic-primitive ditties, tritonic and pentatonic patterns and also a signal- or fanfare-like intonation, connected with certain public functions.

3. (3) The secular melodies which were influenced by Eastern European and also by Hungarian folk songs and dance melodies; in this respect they remind one of analogous phenomena in the cultural history of the Spanish, Italian and German Jews.