BUDAPEST — Ostensibly, a rock concert sparked it, reminding us that culture is not the exclusive province of liberals, certainly not here in Europe. A young woman (who knows whether she was just intending to make trouble) walked into a ticket office in the traditionally Jewish 13th District in this Hungarian capital several weeks ago and asked about Hungarica, an obscure extremist far-right band.

The woman said the ticket agents called her a fascist and threw her out. The agents said that she spouted anti-Semitic abuse when told the office didn’t handle that event. A little later somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail outside the office. Then a blogger, Tamas Polgar, with the screen name Tomcat urged neo-Nazis to rally at the ticket office, and about 30 turned up on April 7 along with 300 counterdemonstrators. Tomcat called for a second rally, four days later, and about 1,000 more extremists were met that time, across police barricades, by 3,000 antifascists, including the beleaguered Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, and the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

It’s hard to know whether to feel disheartened by the large showing of neo-Nazis or encouraged by the larger opposition to it. It turns out that aside from the well-documented rise of the far right, Jewish culture has also been conspicuously on the rise here.

That said, anti-Semitism can thrive even in the absence of a single Jew. History has proved that repeatedly. Hungarica served its purpose without having to play a single note.

The other day Gyorgy Kerenyi, a producer at Hungarian Public Radio who founded a Gypsy-run station, remarked that today’s counterculture among the students he meets at the university where he teaches often seems nationalistic and right wing, tapping into an old European avant-garde tradition.

Might this be because there’s an absence of political engagement on the other side of the spectrum? I inquired first at Trafo, a city-financed theater and art gallery. The gallery recently organized a show by a Polish artist, Artur Zmijewski. (Mr. Zmijewski, among other things, made a video in which he touches up, or “refurbishes,” to use his word, the tattoo of a Polish Auschwitz survivor, perhaps Jewish, perhaps not.) The theater presented a Dutch troupe, Hotel Modern, which staged a performance about the Holocaust. Both events were sensitive, in complex ways, to issues of anti-Semitism.

But, as Gyorgy Szabo, Trafo’s director, noted, the artists involved were foreigners, not Hungarians. “In the Hungarian arts community, we don’t have a tradition of confrontation,” he said. He obviously wasn’t thinking of Hungarica.

He then harked back to the Communist days: “In the former era there was a social treaty that said you can have your privacy as an artist if you don’t touch on political issues.”

Peter Gyorgy, a professor of media theory and an art critic here (he wrote admiringly in the leading Hungarian daily newspaper about Mr. Zmijewski’s show), nodded when he learned what Mr. Szabo had said. Like everyone, he acknowledged that anti-Semitism is more out in the open today.

“Hungary is a deeply traumatized society since the First World War, and the Holocaust, of course,” Mr. Gyorgy said. “After the early years of Hungarian Communism, to be Jewish was one’s private affair. Then after Communism, in the early ’90s, when the multiparty system started, we missed our chance for a public discourse about this situation. Now there’s a confluence: the instability of the government, the hatred for the prime minister and the fact that Jewish culture has become more conspicuous. A new generation of Jews has emerged, which behaves like Jews.”

He was talking especially about young Jews, not necessarily religious, but also not shy about identifying themselves culturally as Jews. “To be Jewish today is a question of one’s public culture,” Mr. Gyorgy went on. During the Communist era, he explained, many Jews grew up hardly knowing they were Jewish; he was among them. “Before, I was defined in a way I could influence,” Mr. Gyorgy said. “Now, as happened in Germany and Austria, that’s over. In today’s political atmosphere, there’s less space for autonomous self-definition. You are forced to address your own Jewishness, to see it as a problem.”

Agoston Mraz, a young centrist-minded political analyst for the Hungarian think tank Nezopont, put it a little differently: “There is a new Jewish pluralism, and Jewish culture is flourishing in Budapest. And one result is that, while I myself don’t think there is such a clear increase in anti-Semitism, there is now the opportunity to be more explicit about it.”

But this is only part of the story. Some months ago a French government bureaucrat named Jean-Pierre Frommer, hearing about efforts to protect the Jewish Ghetto district in Budapest, petitioned for signatures supporting the effort in an open letter to the news media in Hungary. He told a Hungarian literary journal that he was shocked when his gesture provoked anti-Semitic reactions, even though most Jews had long left the neighborhood for the 13th District or elsewhere.

“The fate of something that is important to all of us is at stake,” Mr. Frommer told the journal, Elet es Irodalom. “What Hungarians should understand is that this is not just an issue for the Jews, but an issue for Budapest, for the country.” He was referring to preservation of the neighborhood.

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.”

In any case, he added, as did many others, anti-Semitism has become a political issue exploited by the two main parties now that the ruling coalition has split up and the economy is in free fall. The Socialist Party accuses the center-right opposition party, Fidesz, of not distancing itself firmly enough from the far-right extremists. And Fidesz says that when it was in power, there was no extremist problem.

Meanwhile, far-right groups reap the benefit, occupying the public space left by, among others, the country’s reluctant cultural liberals. As Mr. Szabo, from Trafo, put it, “We need to learn again how to involve ourselves.”

That would be a start.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company