Edited by 91社区 professor Judith Szapor, Department of History and Classical Studies, and Michael L. Miller, from the Central European University in Vienna, Austria, , published by Berghahn Books, explores the ideologies and practices of quota regimes in Central Europe and the ways quotas have been justified, implemented, challenged and remembered, from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century.
Focusing particularly on Central and Eastern Europe, the book鈥檚 chapters cover the origins of quotas, the moral, legal and political arguments developed by their supporters and opponents, and the social and personal impact os these attempts to limit access to higher education.
Professor Szapor spoke to us about the 2020 conference that inspired the edited volume, the social and intellectual impact of academic antisemitism from 1880-1945 and the historical parallels we are currently facing with the contemporary rise of far-right ideologies.
Q: How did you and Dr. Michael Miller come to co-edit Quotas: The Jewish Question and Higher Education in Central Europe 1880-1945? What was the editorial process like?
JS: As is often the case, the volume started out as a conference, organized on the centennial of the 1920 law that introduced an anti-Jewish quota for admission to universities in Hungary. The first antisemitic law in Europe after the First World War, Law XXV/1920, colloquially called the "numerus clausus law," aimed at -- and succeeded in -- drastically reducing the ratio of Hungarian Jewish students at universities during the entire interwar period. The centennial offered the chance to explore the law's broader political and social impact in Hungary, and to look at other anti-Jewish quotas and cases of restrictive ethnic and racial discrimination in Central and East-Central Europe during the interwar period. Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was finally held online, the format we have become so familiar with since then. And its location, Central European University, served as a reminder of the topic's timeliness as only a few months earlier, as a result of the Hungarian government's political campaign, CEU was forced to move from Budapest to Vienna. Exerting political pressure on access (or barriers) to higher education, it seems, is not entirely a thing of the past.
The conference was organized by Michael Miller and M谩ria M. Kov谩cs (more about her in a minute) of CEU's Nationalism Studies; I was asked to come on board as co-editor (and co-author) at the end of the conference. We approached Berghahn Books, a leading academic publisher of Central European and Jewish history, and once they expressed an interest, we asked conference presenters to submit chapters and solicited additional ones. The external reviewers of the completed manuscript were uniformly enthusiastic, Berghahn's editor and copy editor wonderfully efficient, and the volume was published in online and hard back editions in May 2024 at a whopping 450 pages. We very much look forward to the paperback edition that should make the book more affordable...
Q: Part two of Quotas features a chapter on the late M谩ria M. Kov谩cs, professor of Nationalism Studies at Central European University, and a chapter authored by her on the Hungarian numerus clausus. What was the 鈥渘umerus clausus law鈥� and how does this edited volume pay tribute to Kov谩cs鈥� research on antisemitic legislation in Hungary?
JS: The numerus clausus law restricted the admission of Jewish students to universities at 6%, the ratio of Jews (identified by religion) in Hungary's general population. To avoid the charge of discrimination (prohibited by the postwar peace treaties), the law newly defined Jews as an ethnicity and to the outside world, presented the law as motivated by fairness toward Hungary's minorities. Domestically, the law's singular intent to restrict the access of Hungarian Jews to higher education and the professions could not have been clearer. It ended the practice of free access to university education and, more importantly, breached the liberal principle of equal citizenship: Hungarian Jews who were granted full citizenship as "Hungarians of the Mosaic faith" in 1867 would no longer be equal when it came to education. With minor modifications and further discriminatory practices in admissions that targeted Jews, as well as female and leftist students, the law remained in effect until the end the Second World War and severely limited the educational prospects of Hungarian Jewish students. Their ratio among university students dropped from the previous, high levels (in some faculties as high as 40%) to just over the desired 6% and even lower from the late 1930s.
M谩ria M. Kov谩cs, one of the founders of Central European University's Nationalism Studies program passed away in July 2020. She was the author of the , published in English by CEU Press in 2023.
In our volume we included an appreciation of her scholarly contributions and one of her characteristically concise and clearly argued articles. In it, she countered the myths propagated by the law's (then and now) apologists: that it was temporary measure, justified by social and political pressures, not directed against Jews, or any combination thereof. Kov谩cs emphasized the continuities between the 1920 numerus clausus law and the openly anti-Jewish laws introduced by Hungary's government between 1938 and 1942 which gradually excluded Jews from the country's economic, professional, and intellectual life. These laws, she argued, prepared the ground for the Holocaust in Hungary, administered by Nazi German occupying forces but with the broad collaboration of the Hungarian authorities. As a historian and public intellectual, M谩ria Kov谩cs fought a very public battle against recent (and still ongoing) official attempts to absolve Hungary of its wartime responsibility in the extermination of the country's Jews.
Q: In examining the historical roots of anti-Jewish quotas in Central Europe, starting with Imperial Russia, which professions were targeted by these quotas and the rise of antisemitic sentiment? Did these quotas influence other countries within and outside of Europe to adopt anti-Jewish quotas as well?
JS: The openly antisemitic policies of the interwar period did not emerge from a vacuum. The first numerus clausus measure was introduced in Tsarist Russia in 1887, as a response to the perceived, massive influx of Jews into the professions. This pioneering anti-Jewish policy, limiting the admissions of Jews to universities between 3 and 10% at Russian universities, inspired some of the antisemitic demands and practices of the coming decades elsewhere. (A point we make in the introduction is that Jews were not the only targets of such quotas: in 1864, with most of Poland under Russian rule, the Tsarist authorities restricted the admission of Polish Catholic students at 10%, to punish them for the January Uprising in the previous year.) Russian Jewish students who flocked to the universities of Germany prompted antisemitic rhetoric there as early as the 1880s to target "foreign-born" -- code for Jewish -- students, especially in medicine.
Emerging in the last decades of the 19th century, populist, right-wing politicians in East Central and Central Europe proudly identified as antisemitic. (And not only there -- France in the throes of the Dreyfus Affair was another example of this trend.) They played on traditional anti-Jewish prejudices and concocted an early version of today's "great replacement theory" by lamenting the high ratios of Jews in the liberal professions, especially medicine and law. Recently emancipated Jewish citizens of Central and East Central Europe increasingly chose university education and the professions as a pathway to full assimilation -- and they also embraced economic and cultural modernization and modernity at a time traditional elites were reluctant to do so. This new political antisemitism, emerging at the turn of the 20th century and supported by a newly militant Catholic church was, at heart, a reaction to economic and social modernization and cultural modernity, threatening the privileges of the traditional elites.
The First World War and its aftermath witnessed lethal antisemitic violence in Eastern and East Central Europe, even in victorious countries, such as Romania or Poland. Existing anti-Jewish prejudices were amplified by the convenient myth of "Judeo-Bolshevism" that falsely identified Jews with the post-war revolutions. Right-wing regimes, from Hungary to Poland, used these myths as a licence to cleanse education and the civil service not only of Jews but also of liberals. Hungary, under an avowedly illiberal government may have been the only country to codify a law that restricted the university enrolment of Jews, but in Poland and Romania, governments tolerated the segregation of Jewish students. Right-wing student militias were tacitly encouraged, as they meted out regular beatings and confined Jewish students to so-called "ghetto-benches." Admissions were tweaked to raise further obstacles to Jewish enrolment -- a measure increasingly extended to academic high schools as well. One of the first laws enacted in Nazi Germany in 1933 imposed a 1.5% quota for Jewish students in public schools and universities. And while people usually associate antisemitic discrimination with Nazi Germany and other right-wing dictatorships in Europe, North America was not exempt from it. University administrators there expressed alarm over a perceived "Jewish takeover" even before the First World War. And from the 1920s, Ivy League universities -- first Columbia, then Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- all introduced an informal "Jewish quota," driven by the social antisemitism of their administrators and the fear that an increase in Jewish enrolment would make the schools less attractive to their traditional constituency, sons of the WASP elite. Administrators of the leading Canadian universities, including 91社区, alarmed mainly by the growing enrolment of Jewish students in medicine also applied informal "Jewish quotas" from the 1920s into the 1950s -- and like their American peers, mainly by tweaking admissions policies.
Q: What impacts did these quotas have on the professional and personal lives of students and professors across European universities? How did these quotas contribute to the 鈥榖rain drain鈥� from Europe to North America?
JS: While the history of the intellectual refugees from Hitler's Europe to North America is a well- studied field, it is mainly concerned with scientists and professionals who were already trained in their profession. By contrast, apart from a handful of studies, most of what we know about the social impact of antisemitic policies and practices in East and East Central Europe is anecdotal and can only be pieced together from memoirs and oral histories. The main impact of the interwar period's academic antisemitism, whether legally codified or informal was, of course, the painful loss of opportunity to study for many thousands of talented, dedicated young people. Some of them would get a second chance to enroll at university after the war, but most of them never did -- if they survived at all. A couple of chapters in our volume highlight the fate of the so-called "numerus clausus exiles." They included the approximately ten thousand Hungarian students who left to study abroad in Germany (before 1933), and in Fascist Italy and Austria (before 1938), or the Polish Jewish students who went to study at the German-language universities of interwar Czechoslovakia, where they were lumped together with ethnic Germans to prompt a nationalistic backlash.
The broader social and intellectual impact of academic antisemitism in the interwar period, especially before 1933 and 1938 when antisemitism became official policy in most of Central and East Central Europe, is certainly one of the research areas we were hoping to encourage with our volume. And on a personal note, in my current study of Hungarian Jewish women whose lives were fundamentally altered by the Jewish quota, I look at both the personal cost and the broader social impact of the law.
Q: As you and Miller wrote the book鈥檚 afterword, 鈥淭he Enduring Legacy of Quotas,鈥� the United States Supreme Court ruled in two cases against American universities on affirmative action. As historians, how has this rise in extreme right-wing ideologies impacted the reception of your research?
JS: The Supreme Court issued its rulings just as we were submitting the final version of the manuscript, and while they were far from unexpected, we waited with bated breath for the decisions. Although on the face of it, affirmative action has very little to do with academic antisemitism, they share a common underlying thread: the attempt to remedy genuine or perceived injustices, to open or bar access to the elites. Ideally, we would have wanted to include in our volume examples of so-called positive discrimination to correct historical injustices, common in the post-WWII period, from Eastern Europe to as far as Brazil, and hope to see more studies on them in a comparative context.
As for the recent and ongoing, ideologically charged attacks on elite universities and debates about the role of higher education, especially in the United States, they confirm our view that universities continue to be the site where political and ideological agendas clash and old and new elites stake out their interests. In other words, universities are targeted because they are still very much regarded as important. Of course, as academics ourselves, we would like to think that what we do matters, even if we perhaps (to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm) wish for times a little less interesting...
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Judith Szapor is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies. She has published widely on the social and gender history of Hungary and East Central Europe between the late 19th century and the post-WWII period. Her current project explores the personal and broader social impact of the 1920 numerus clausus law on Hungarian Jewish women. , based on her research, has been shown in Budapest, Bonn, and, currently, Berlin.
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