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Peregrination in the Age of the Numerus Clausus: Hungarian

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Peregrination in the Age of the Numerus Clausus: Hungarian DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 PEREGRINATION IN THE AGE OF THE NUMERUS CLAUSUS: HUNGARIAN JEWISH STUDENTS IN INTERWAR EUROPE Ágnes Katalin Kelemen A DISSERTATION In History Presented to the Faculties of the Central European University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Budapest, Hungary 2019 Supervisors Victor Karády CEU eTD Collection Michael Laurence Miller DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 Copyright in the text of this dissertation rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European University Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions and no materials previously written and/or published by another person unless otherwise noted. CEU eTD Collection II DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 Abstract This dissertation investigates the dynamics between academic antisemitism, Jewish social mobility and Jewish migration through the case study of the “numerus clausus exiles” – as Jewish students who left interwar Hungary due to the antisemitic numerus clausus law (Law XXV of 1920) were called by contemporaries and historians. After a conceptual and historiographic introduction in the first chapter embedding this work in the contexts of Jewish studies, social history and exile studies; interwar Hungarian Jewish peregrination is examined from four different aspects in four chapters based on four different types of sources. In the second chapter an analysis of contemporary Hungarian (Jewish and non-Jewish) discourses is based on pro-Horthy, Conservative, Liberal, Social Democratic, assimilationist Jewish and Zionist press. It is argued that peregrination from Hungary was in the general press recognized as a mostly Jewish phenomenon, caused by the restriction of Jewish access to Hungarian universities, rather than a voluntary movement motivated by thirst for knowledge. In the meantime, the plight of émigré students became a central topic in Jewish press because a new Hungarian Jewish community of fate and identity was built on the support mechanism for numerus clausus exiles. Based on a database of over 1000 Hungarian medical and engineering students enrolled in universities abroad between 1920 and 1938 – Czechoslovakia, the First Austrian Republic, Weimar Germany and Fascist Italy – that the dissertation’s author constructed; the third chapter analyzes the social background of émigré students – most of whom were Jewish. In this way the CEU eTD Collection case is made that studying abroad was a phenomenon of lower middleclass Jewish youth’s upward social mobility through education rather than an escape route reserved for privileged Jews. III DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 Ego documents written and edited (in most cases even published) by numerus clausus exiles provide the source base for the fourth chapter which reconstructs their own narratives on their peregrination. The prevalence of interpreting their student migration as exile from the Hungarian homeland unfolds both from autobiographies and memoirs written decades later and from letters sent while studying abroad, albeit with important individual variations. Based on digital databases, the fifth chapter follows up the career and life trajectories of students after their studies abroad. Four basic patterns are distinguished among the biographies of the over 1000 subjects: the most successful ones emigrated to the Western world usually through step-migration through Weimar Germany and did not return to Hungary. Few numerus clausus exiles immigrated to Palestine, however, they played important roles in the higher education and scholarship of Mandate Palestine and later of the State of Israel. Most numerus clausus exiles were forced to return to Hungary in the late 1930s due to the spread of hostility towards foreign Jews across Europe. They belong to two main groups, namely Shoah victims and Shoah survivors. The latter were likely to stay in Hungary for the rest of their lives after liberation, their experience with emigration notwithstanding, because they received opportunities for career advancement earlier denied to them and many believed this was also a chance to redeem Hungary from inequalities and injustices through Socialism. At the same time, quite a few numerus clausus exiles were put on show trials in the Stalinist period due to their past abroad and many more got disillusioned by the discrepancies between the ideal of Communism and the reality of State Socialism. Finally, it is argued in the final conclusions that this study speaks to the larger questions of CEU eTD Collection how a minority can respond to discrimination and how individual initiatives from below can develop into communal agency based on solidarity. IV DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis advisors Prof. Victor Karady and Prof. Michael L. Miller for their continuous support of my doctoral study and related research. I am grateful for the institutional support I received from my alma mater, the Central European University between 2015 and 2019 and for the Leo Baeck Fellowship I received from the German Studienstiftung in 2016-2017. While I wish the Hungarian government had not provided my research topic with such additional timeliness and relevance as it did with its infringements on academic freedom, I am happy that I was a CEU student in the time of Lex CEU that will be an important topic of the 21st century history of higher education. This dissertation analyzing a chapter of 20th century history of universities is dedicated to all students, professors, universities and academies of sciences ever attacked in any state. My sincere thanks goes to Professors Laura Almagor, Gábor Egry, Judit Forrai, Zvi Gitelman, István Hargittai, András Kovács, Mária M. Kovács, Péter Tibor Nagy, Martina Steer, and Judith Szapor who helped me to enhance my research questions and methods through reading and discussing my work. I owe special thanks to Prof. András Kovács for drawing my attention on the “Brno group”. I am thankful to Claudia Schülzky, Paulus Ebner and Vit Smerha who went out of their ways to help my research in the archives of Berlin’s, Vienna’s and Prague’s Technical CEU eTD Collection Universities. I sincerely thank Robin Bellers for reading my chapters and developing my English academic writing for so many years. V DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 I highly appreciate the help of Professors Jessie Labov, Rob Farrell and Victor Lagutov for introducing me in the world of digital humanities and digital mapping with special regard to QGIS. I am also grateful for Csaba Bendzsák for comparing the data I collected about émigré students with the data of Jewish students enrolled in Hungary under the Jewish quota and for introducing me to SPSS. With a special mention to János Almai, the late Pál Bárdos, Esther Bánki, Ninette Dombrovszky, Ines Fenyves, Anna Maria Hábermann, Ivan Ivanji, Ádám Kis, Alan Mandl and Pál Várnai I would like to express my gratitude to all the descendants of numerus clausus exiles who shared the stories, letters, documents and photos of their parents, aunts and uncles with me. I thank Ferenc Laczó for connecting me with Esther Bánki. I am immensely grateful to my friends and colleagues Adela Hîncu, Ágnes Kende, Réka Krizmanics and Alexandra Medzibrodszky for reading and commenting my chapters and for the feminist struggle and moral support we shared over the years. I feel thankful to Zsófia Zvolenszky for warm encouragements and advice in countless academic and other situations, and in addition, for familiarizing me with the concept of epistemic humility. A very special gratitude goes out to my parents Judit Bárdos and János (Jimmy) Kelemen for supporting me in my studies and in all walks of life. Likewise, a very special gratitude goes out to Tibor Kiszely for all his emotional support, for reading and commenting my chapters and for rendering my tables sensible. CEU eTD Collection VI DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.10 Table of contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... III Acknowledgements......................................................................................................... V Table of contents ......................................................................................................... VII List of illustrations .................................................................................................... IX List of tables ............................................................................................................. IX I. “Symbol of Hungarian Jewry, you wandering student!” ................................................1 I.1. Introduction ...........................................................................................................1 I.2. Conceptual framework ...........................................................................................7 I.3. Historiography and literature review .................................................................... 14 I.4. Research questions, hypotheses and methodology ...............................................
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