School for teachers in higher primary schools, transferred to Szeged in 1928), preserved (and by the end of the period enhanced) the status of the capital city as the absolute center of women’s higher education in the country in the inter-war years. While in 1925/6 only 52 % of all female university students were studying in Budapest, this was the case of 68 % of them by 1938/9.
But between the two last years mentioned one can observe hardly any general progress as to the participation of girls in higher education. Globally, student numbers in universities decreased gradually and significantly – by one third - during this period in Budapest (from 4515 in 1925/6 to 3006 in 1938/9) and oscillated in the three provincial universities around 1000 students with ups and downs in each. The share of women stood at 11,7 % in 1925/6 to reach 13,8 % only in 1938/9 in universities proper (excluding other institutions of higher education).48 This quasi-stagnation can be interpreted as a visible impact of the policy ofnumerus claususon the participation of women in higher education.
Czechoslovakia, but also, more exceptionally, Croatia, Transylvania under Romanian rule or Serbia) or Germany and Switzerland, where members of the Hungarian Jewish intelligentsia were accustomed to spend their academic Wanderjahren already before 1914. Vienna was a central place for earlier peregrinations51 where the proportion of Jews among students from Hungary – some 23 % altogether in all institutions of higher education – was similar to that studying in contemporary Hungary.52 In 1910 among students from Hungary at the University of Vienna Jews represented as much as 48 % in the Medical Faculty, 23 % in the Law Faculty and 14 % in the Arts and Sciences Faculty.53 Higher studies abroad had moderate or tolerable financial costs before 1919, and the countries cited above offered favorable human conditions sharing the Central European urban culture and an academic system modeled on the Prussian pattern, which was that of Hungary too. The last aspect could be important since study terms (semesters) could be validated, sometimes without reservation, in a curriculum liable to be crowned by a Hungarian graduation or, failing this, foreign degrees granted in these countries could be easily recognized as equivalent (via nostrification) to a national diploma.
Vienna continued to be important for expatriated Jewish students after 1920 for some years, but less and less so, due to the increase of living costs and the growing anti-Jewish tide. The Technische Hochshule adopted a 10 % ‘Jewish quota’ in 1923 and there were anti-Jewish restrictions in the classical University of Vienna too.54 German universities offered usually better reception in the Weimar Republic, though the mounting tide of Nazism by the end of the 1920s and the high costs of living made life more and more difficult for the ‘refugees of the numerus clausus’ 55 till it made it eventually impossible after the Nazi take-over in January 1933. At that time France and most particularly Italy became major choices for studies of Hungarian Jews abroad.56 The Italian fascist government prepared a hearty welcome to foreigners, including Jews, notably by abolishing tuition fees in 1923. This policy was reversed though in 1938, when Mussolini sacrificed his formerly philosemitic stance on the altar of the alliance with the Third Reich.57
51 See Gábor Patyi, Magyarországi diákok bécsi egyetemeken és főiskolákon, 1890-1918, /Hungarian students in Viennese universities and academies, 1890-1918/, Budapest, 2004.
52Ibid. op. cit. 34.
53 See my study, Funktionswandel der österreichischen Hochschulen in der Ausbildung der ungarischen Fachintelligenz vor und nach dem ersten Weltkrieg, in Victor Karady, Wolfgand Mitter (ed.),Education and Social Structure in Central Europe in the 19th and 21th century, Köln-Wien, Böhlau Verlag, 1990, 177-207, especially 188.
54 Michael L. Miller, From White Terror to Red Vienna, in Frank Stern, Barbara Eichinger (ed.), Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung, 1900-1938, Böhlau Verlag, Wien, Köln, Weimar, 2009, 307-323.55 See Michael L. Miller’s study in this volume.
56 See the relevant data in Funktionswandel...,198.
57 See Andrea Camelli, Présence et caractéristiques des étudiants étrangers en Italie, 1945-1998, in Hartmut Rüdiger Peter, Natalia Tikhonov (ed.), Les Universités : ponts a travers l’Europe, Frankfurt/M, etc., Peter Lang, 2003, 113-135, particularly 115-116.
There is no reliable information about the quantitative scope of the Jewish student body abroad under the numerus clausus, though contemporary and subsequent estimations put it to a very high level. Taking into account classical universities and the Budapest Polytechnics in the years 1910/11-1913/14 some 3,5
% of the Hungarian student population was studying abroad. This figure was 5 % in 1920/21-1922/23 and 6,5 % in 1923/4-1925/26 following official data.58 If proportions did not show a dramatic change, the absolute figure of peregrines abroad jumped from an average of 516 in the years 1910/11-1913/14 to a mean number of 898 in 1920/21-1922/23 and 1071 in 1923/24-1925/26. But the big difference between the pre-war and the post-war period was in this respect that the proportion of Jews among students abroad became preponderant after 1919 from a minority of may be just one quarter or one fifth earlier.
My survey results on enrollments in the University of Vienna for sample semesters between 1920/21 and 1930/31 indicate that among students from Hungary 91 % were Jewish in the Medical Faculty and 71 % in the Philosophical (Arts and Sciences) Faculty.59 One of the main authorities of the statistical services of inter-war Hungary (an author of right extremist orientation) evaluated quite similarly the Jewish share among Hungarian students abroad at 80 % for the whole period.60 This statistical study set the proportion of those abroad among all Jewish students from Hungary between 25 % and 45 % following different years (with a summit of 51 % for 1927/28), that is, an average of one third of all Jewish students at one time.61 But all this does not say anything about the real numbers concerned, whether in absolute or relative terms. Another source (from an author passionately committed against the discriminatory law) mentioned for the years around 1925 some five thousand Jewish academic exiles62 - a most probably excessive figure, though it is often taken for granted by several authors (included some in this book). A different contemporary source, favorable to the incriminated numerus clausus law, referred to official statistical data on Hungarian students abroad in the years 1920/21-1923/24, stating that these numbers oscillated around 1100 with a probability that some three fourth of them - 7-800 - were Jewish.63 It also cited a Jewish source stating that in the years under scrutiny the Central Committee of Student Assistance in Budapest cared for 760 Hungarian Jewish students abroad.64 This figure appears to be consistent with the estimation above, following which those abroad might represent one third of all Jews from Hungary engaged in higher studies in and outside the rump state,
58 Published inHungarian statistical yearbooks.
59 See the relevant table in Funktionswandel...,,202.
60 Cf. Alajos Kovács, Magyarországi zsidó hallhatók hazai és külföldi főiskolákon, /Jewish students from Hungary in Hungarian and foreign institutions of higher learning/, Magyar statisztikai szemle, /Hungarian statistical review/, 1938, 9, 897-902, particularly 899.
61 Alajos Kovács,loc.cit.
62 Pál Bethlen (ed.),Numerus clausus, Budapest (no date, 1925 ?), 139, 146.
63 István Haller,Harc a numerus clausus körül, /Fight around the numerus clausus/, Budapest, 1926, 154.
64Ibid., 155.
since in the years between 1920 and 1930 Jews identified among students in Hungary proper were around 1500-2000. It is also consistent with official data on students abroad, a yearly average of 898 in 1920/21-1922/23 and as many as 1071 in 1923/4-1925/6,65 if the above estimation is confirmed that four-fifth of them were Jewish. Further research is still needed to arrive at definitive results in this matter, but the main conclusions, drafted above, are certainly credible.
Provincial universities represented, nevertheless, another route of escape for Jews under the numerus clausus, however restricted this proved to be, especially in the 1930s, following the rise of right extremism. The arguments and demonstrations put forward is Maria M. Kovács’ study in this book convincingly explain the conjunctural conditions in which provincial universities acted, sometimes voluntarily, in favor of the admission of Jews rejected in Budapest.
The particularly liberal policy of the University of Pécs in the 1920s – a borderline case in this matter - is rather well known, especially in its Medical Faculty during the immediate aftermaths of the introduction of the numerus clausus. Among parents of Jewish medical students enrolled in Pécs in 1919-1929 some 41 % were living in Budapest against 20 % of parents of Christian students.
Comparable proportions were 23 % against 5,6 % in Szeged and 15 % against 4 % in Debrecen for the same years.66 As to students of the Arts and Sciences for the same years the comparable proportions of parents living in Budapest were in Pécs 15 % for Jews as against 4 % for others, in Szeged 24 % for Jews and 4 % for others, in Debrecen 7 % for Jews and 4 % for others.67 Manifestly, the peregrination of Jewish students from the capital city to the provinces affected above all Pécs and Szeged, much less Debrecen. Anyhow, the transfer of many Jewish students of Medicine and the Arts and Sciences to the provinces who, earlier, would have logically sought enrollment in Budapest, is well attested.
Table 3 carries other results to the same effect.
The contrast for Jews is indeed strongly marked between the pre-war situation and the years under the numerus clausus. Rejection of Jews from Budapest was obviously decisive under the repressive legislation, while only quite limited in the provinces, especially in Pécs.
There the Medical Faculty would take up Jewish candidates in the beginning without much hesitation, since they contributed irreplaceably to the legitimization of the very subsistence of the new institution. Later on this special position of Pécs manifestly faded away to the benefit mostly of the two other provincial universities and also, to some extent, on behalf of Budapest. By the end of the 1920s Budapest University (probably due to the 1928 attenuation of the numerus clausus) regained up to one half of all Jewish university students in the country, but not more, contrary to the pre-war situation. In the same time Szeged but also Debrecen came up each with some one sixth of the Jewish student body admitted to university studies inside Hungary. For non Jews, a contrary
65 Data calculated from theHungarian statistical yearbooks of the years concerned.
66 From my survey results of graduates and students in Hungarian higher education cited in note 1.
67 Survey results as in the precedent note.
development can be observed with the progressive diminution of the overcrowding of the capital city – which was more pronounced, as we have seen above, in the early 1920s than before the war - and the increase of the intake due to the provincial universities.
Table 3. The territorial distribution of Jewish and non Jewish students before and after the introduction of the numerus clausus in Hungarian classical universities and law academies (selected years)68
JEWS Budapest
University Kolozsvár/Szeged
University Pozsony/
PécsUniversity
Debrecen
University Law
Academies Altogether Number ofstudents
1913/14 85,4 8,7 - - 5,9 100,0 3 043
1920/21 34,6 28,4 25,9 2,1 8,8 100,0 1 427
1921/22 31,7 12,4 43,0 4,5 8,4 100,0 1 941
1922/23 34,5 10,7 40,6 5,5 8,6 100,0 1 980
1923/24 39,4 10,0 38,8 7,1 4,7 100,0 1 527
1924/25 45,8 10,6 28,9 8,2 6,4 100,0 1 256
1925/26 48,3 11,6 22,0 8,6 9,6 100,0 1 107
1926,27 51,4 13,1 17,3 9,3 8,7 100,0 1 027
1927/28 56,0 14,2 13,5 8,8 7,5 100,0 1 037
1928/29 52,3 15,8 12,0 14,3 5,6 100,0 1 121
1929/30 49,5 16,1 11,4 17,3 5,7 100,0 1 213
1930/31 48,5 17,0 11,1 16,9 6,4 100,0 1 427
CHRIS-TIANS Budapest
University Kolozsvár/Szeged
University Pozsony/
PécsUniversity
Debrecen
University Law
Academies Altogether Number ofstudents
1913/14 60,7 22,9 - - 16,4 100,0 8 100
1920/21 73,4 10,5 3,3 4,9 7,9 100,0 8 418
1923/24 71,0 8,8 7,0 6,9 6,9 100,0 10 013
1927/28 62,0 11,0 9,7 9,1 9,1 100,0 10 232
1930/31 55,3 11,4 22,1 10,8 10,8 100,0 10 671
Table 3 offers a clear picture in its last column of the indeed brutal global outcome of thenumerus clausus for Jews. In 1920/21 the Jewish student body was less than half of the pre-war number – one fifth only in Budapest -, in spite of the fact that the rump state with its capital (the latter alone holding after 1919 close to half of Jews in the country) was harboring the bulk of ‘modernised’ and
‘assimilated’ Jewish middle classes, the offspring of which were filling the benches of universities. Among Jews inscribed in the Medical Faculty of the capital city in 1870-1920 almost half (48,6 %) were born in Transdanubia and between Danube and Tisza,69 while only 41 % of the Hungarian Jewish population was living in these regions in 1900.70 In 1910 the two Western and central regions of the country hosted 55 % of Jewish members of the liberal professions and civil servants, the staple sources of those engaged in educational
68 Data from theHungarian statistical yearbooks.
69 Results of the prosopographical survey of Hungarian students and graduates cited in note 1.
70 Calculated from data inHungarian statistical report 5, 538-539.
mobility via higher studies.71 Without numerus clausus Jews should have logically increased their relative share among students in the rump state, following pre-war trends of educational proclivities. Though Jewish student numbers grew somewhat in the years 1921-1923, then they went down to as low as one third of the pre-war level for several years, exactly till the 1928 upturn (abolition of the explicitly anti-Jewish bias of the numerus clausus). But even after this, their numbers hardly attained the 1920 level in 1930/31. Nothing comparable happened for Christian students of classical universities, whose numbers exceeded the pre-war level throughout the 1920s with a visible tendency to grow.
Obviously enough, the escape route to the provinces was also a straight one for Jews, like that of studies abroad. It mobilized only a part of an utterly decimated potential Jewish student population. Still one can cautiously estimate that in the first years of the anti-Jewish legislation there were as many or even more Jewish student exiles in the provinces than abroad, following the estimations of those forced to expatriate themselves in the early 1920s. In later years, the number of those beginning their studies in foreign countries must have taken the upper hand, as compared to Jewish students in provincial faculties in Hungary proper.