Except that Hungarians lobbying to preserve the Ghetto district insist that anti-Semitism hasn’t been a problem for their effort at all. To the contrary, they said the other day, the real trouble comes from developers, several of whom are Israelis, in cahoots with district politicians. It was coincidental, they maintained, that all the core members of their preservation group happen to be Jewish.

One of them is Janos Ladanyi, a sociologist specializing in the Roma, or Gypsies. We met one morning at an outdoor cafe near the Buda Castle. He described two currents of Hungarian anti-Semitism, one cultural, the other political. Culturally speaking, “there is a general belief that anti-Semitism, or racism, is a denial of the right to be different,” he said. “In Hungary it is all right today if you behave as a religious Jew. The Ghetto is fine for that reason. It’s a distinct historical entity. But what is now being denied here is the notion that Jews, no matter how we behave, are the same as non-Jews. The problem comes when we say we are like them.”

Maybe. The other day, at the Orthodox Synagogue in the Ghetto district, an Art Nouveau masterpiece from 1912, Gabor Zoltan, an elfin, 60-something guide who offered to show a visitor around, said that for the first time he could recall he was openly mocked on the street, not long ago, for wearing a yarmulke.

A professor who often appears on television, and has never made an issue of being Jewish, said that recently a driver stopped to let him cross the street, then rolled down his car window to announce that ordinarily he would run over a Jew but, recognizing the professor, decided against it.

The professor preferred not to be identified. So did a middle-aged Hungarian who has spent years investigating discrimination here. Lately he has been taken aback by his parents, whom he had never heard utter a word against Jews during the Communist years as he was growing up. Suddenly they’ve started to make little anti-Semitic remarks.

Loyal Hungarians all, these unnerved people cautioned against overstating the problem, which, while pervading the culture, is nothing like discrimination against the Roma (as if that’s any consolation). They suggested anti-Semitism may be no worse here than in other eastern and central European countries. Tibor Frank, a Hungarian historian, described the situation in the context of longstanding prejudices that link Jews with national debacles like the Bolshevik revolt of 1919 and the years of Communist rule, when many leaders were Jewish. Today those associations have passed on to the troubled Socialists. “The Jewish issue,” he said, “is part of a larger reassessment of our history.”