This article looks at the careers of two school-founding Hungarian historians and university professors, the reconstruction, interpretation and comparison of their perceptions of history, their views on the role of the historiographer, and their opinions on the history of Jews in Hungary. Since both openly professed to be Hungarian Jews, I also try to find out what that meant for them. My interpretive frame follows the ‘speech-act’ approach of the Cambridge contextual school of the history of ideas, the description of notions of meaning/attribution of meaning, and the ‘drama triangle’ (the identification of the traumatized roles of the victim, persecutor and rescuer) in the literature of trauma elaboration.