The article aims at presentation, analysis, and evaluation of the achievements of Jenő Lévai, the precursor of the research on the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews. Modern cross-section works regarding Hungarian Jews are to a large extent based on his works, which at the same time are gradually losing their reputation as their value is being increasingly questioned, and that contrasts with the scale of his past achievements at the beginning of the post-war period. Laczó analyses Lévai’s key publications: Endre László. A háborús bűnösök magyar listavezetője (1945), which talks about the main Hungarian planner and executor of the Holocaust, Black Book of the Suffering of Hungarian Jewry (1946), which was the first study on the Holocaust in Hungary, A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története [true history of a miraculous escape from the Pest ghetto] (1947) about the ghetto in Pest, and Lévai’s main synthesis Zsidósors Magyarországon [history of Jews in Hungary] (1948). The author concludes most controversy over Lévai’s studies is caused by the ideological interpretation they offer and Lévai’s tuning to the communists’ political goals.