English friends and contacts of György Kalmár

Abstract

In September 1749 György Kalmár, a graduate of the Protestant College of Debrecen signed his name in the Readers Book at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Although he was there to follow his Hebraic studies, apart from that he was instructed by the Hungarian Calvinist Church also to represent the cause of Hungarian Protestants who suffered discrimination under the rule of the Catholic Queen of Hungary, Maria Theresia. Kalmár was a talented Hebraist who within a year in England managed to publish a learned tract on Hebrew philology, printed by the Press of Oxford University. This was followed by three further booklets in London taking issue with the followers of John Hutchinson, a
theologian who maintained that the language spoken by Adam and Eve was an early version of Hebrew.
While these facts were known to Hungarian scholars, this study is the first attempt to describe Kalmár’s contacts in Oxford and his travels throughout Great Britain. He spent three years in England which he later remembered as perhaps being the most fruitful and happiest period of his life. On the basis of his English correspondence and the books he signed to various scholars it is possible to survey his activities which included frequent visits to the meetings of the Royal Society in London and plans to print a book (by subscription) on „the universal language” which he invented. These plans did not materialise, but later on he published Hebrew textbooks and a quaint book, “Prodromus”,
written partly in Latin, partly in Hungarian hexameters, copies of which are extant in British libraries. Kalmár visited England once again in 1770, but by that time most of his earlier acquaintances died or were no longer active.