The most misleading legend attached to the history of thenumerus clausus is the assertion that the law was “abolished” in 1928. The legend of „abolition”
started at the end of the 1920s, but lingers in historical publications to this day. Its nascence was made possible by the clever politics of the Bethlen government. The numerus clausus was not really abolished in 1928, but merely renamed; and the discrimination against Jews in the universities did not stop. The only truth in the legend is that the law’s racial paragraph underwent some metamorphosis.
Under pressure from the League of Nations, the Bethlen government did indeed formally remove the Jewish quota from the law in 1928. But on the other hand they introduced a new quota into the law, which was a so-called occupational quota. The goal of the new quota was the same as of the old one, to keep the Jews away from the universities, but to do it in such a way this time so as not to give the League of Nations any grounds for condemnation of Hungary for racial discrimination. Klebelsberg advised Prime Minister Bethlen two years before the modification to change the law, but to do so in such a way that the
„thousands” of Jewish students should nonetheless be kept out of the universities.
Bethlen in other words should bow to the League’s pressure, but this concession should be purely formal. The government eventually replaced the racial quota with a quota that restricted the numbers of students to be admitted according to the occupation of the applicant’s father.81 The internal proportions of the professional quota were developed in such a way as to prevent any significant increase of the proportion of Jews within the new system.
The government did not wish to comment formally on the philosophy behind the modifications in 1928 – for understandable reasons – since the whole point of the exercise was so that the League of Nations could not continue to condemn Hungary for discriminating against Jews. Ten years later, however, when Hungarian politics was looking no longer in the direction of the League, but to Germany for friendship, the president of the Central Office of Statistics, Alajos
81The text of the law introducing the professional quota ran: „When granting permission, as well as considering the applicant’s patrotisim and moral rectitude, the results of their highest level of academic study should be considered, as should their intellectual ability. In the first instance, the children of war widows and those with war service, of civil servants and other various occupations (agriculture, industry, trade, the liberal professions, etc.) should get to the polytechnics in the numbers in proportion to the numbers belonging to these occupations and their significance, and that the number of those admitted should be equitably distributed between the different municipalities.” Documents of the Chamber of Deputies [Képviselőházi irományok], 1927, vol.
VI., p. 434.
Kovács described in detail the internal logic of the 1928 professional quota.
According to him: „that softer version of the numerus clausus that the late Count Klebelsberg, Minister of Culture, initiated – although it did not say openly that certain races are to be admitted to the universities in accordance with their proportion within the population – it…effectively serves the same purpose…
Insofar as in the first [occupational] category, which includes about half the applicants, there are hardly any Jews, in the second half of the numbers…there would overwhelmingly have been smallholders…in the end, the proportion of Jews among the students would have been approximately equal to their proportion of the overall population.”82
It was not hard to grasp the motives behind the changes. Lucien Wolf, ann Englishman, who wrote the report on the modification for the League of Nations, clearly saw that the new, occupational quota „can be used for anti-Semitic ends”;
however, as he wrote, the starting point still has to be that the actions of the Hungarian government were „made in good faith.”83 The League of Nations therefore did not concern itself with the hidden motives behind the new quota: it was satisfied that the Jewish quota as such had been taken out of the law. It considered the removal of the Jewish quota a symbolic victory, and did not expect anything more. The leaders of the Jewish community in Hungary felt the same, and hoped that the symbolic concessions would be followed by real change in due course.
The government itself tried to appease opinion both at home and abroad.
After 1928, in accordance with the expectations of the League of Nations, it raised the number of Jews allowed to be admitted to university (by a suitable minimal number). In the next four years, the proportion of Jewish students admitted increased (by around 250 people a year), from 8.8% in 1928-29 to 9.6% in 1930, 10.5% in 1931, 12.3% in 1932, and 12.5% in 1933. All this however is by no means to say that Jewish students really enjoyed equal opportunities with their Christian counterparts. Under the new quota, in 1928 roughly half to 7% of Jewish applicants to university were rejected while for Christian students the rejection rate was 10-15%. The majority of Jewish youths with high school diplomas still did not have an opportunity to study further.
Despite the exculpatory arguments of the Bethlen government for foreign consumption that protested that the proportion of Jewish students had risen above the old 6% quota, what was not mentioned was that even so, two thirds of Jewish students wishing to pursue their higher education could not get into university.
There was a cynical game of propaganda played with the numbers and percentages. For, although the 12% of Jewish students did indeed represent an increase of 10% compared to the old quota of 6%, these figures disguised numbers that were very low to start off with; so, even a small numerical increase of these figures produced significant results when translated into percentages.
82 Alajos Kovács (1938), p. 39.
83 Ladányi (1979), p. 1131.
Despite the populist propaganda surrounding the percentages, thousands of Jewish students hoping to continue their studies were still stranded outside of the universities.
To summaries, then: the racial quota was not „abolished” in 1928, but renamed. Let me record one more example here that challenges the myth of
„abolition”, this time from 1934. After Hitler’s takeover of power, Hungarian racial supremacists demanded that the Hungarian government openly reinstate the explicit Jewish quota. The Gömbös government was not inclined to this, but it was willing – without any legal framework, in line with the racial supremacists’
demands – to decrease the proportion of Jewish students. The Minister of the Interior, Ferenc Fischer Keresztes declared in the Cabinet meeting in January 1934 that „in the coming year, the proportion of Jews would be observed.”84
Source: Cabinet Records [Minisztertanácsi Jegyzőkönyv], 16 January1934, p. 5.
According to the record, Fischer Keresztes did not need to explain his meaning. He did not need to specify what „proportion of Jews” he was referring to. He did not have to concern himself that such a „proportion” did not – in principle – exist in law following the modification of 1928; everyone present there in the Cabinet knew which „proportion” he was referring to, since the quota had never really been abolished, merely rechristened. The proportion of Jewish students immediately started to decrease following the Minister of the Interior’s statement, and by 1935 had reached the lowest recorded proportion of the 1920s, while thousands of Jewish applicants were left outside the higher education system.
All this of course does not mean that the trends supported by the numerus clausus could not conceivably have been subdued after the modification of 1928.
Without that great turn in European politics that was the rise of Nazism, it could all have turned out differently. For example, the racial quota could initially have been renamed, while more, and some genuine reforms could have followed. This was the way events developed in the United States, where the few private
84 Records of the Cabinet of Ministers [Minisztertanácsi Jegyzőkönyv], 16th January 1934, p. 5.
universities which imposed a Jewish quota came round to abolishing them only very slowly, by the 1950s.
But in Europe, history took a different turn. In Hungary, the fourth paragraph of the second Jewish law of 1939 reinstated the explicit quota on Jews in the universities, and once again capped their proportion at 6% at universities and law colleges.85