Numerus clausus (Hungary, 1920)
누메루스 클라우수스 (헝가리, 1920)
Act XXV of 1920, passed by the Hungarian National Assembly in September 1920. By requiring each “race and nationality” to be represented among university students in proportion to its share of the population, it restricted Jewish students without naming them. It is regarded as the first anti-Jewish law in Europe after the First World War; the nationality quota was removed in 1928.
In depth
The original bill, tabled by the education minister István Haller on 22 June 1920, merely capped enrolment, but pressure within the governing party added the quota by nationality. Jews were about 6 per cent of the population but some 15 per cent of students in the 1910s and over 30 per cent in the popular faculties. Of the 219-member National Assembly 64 voted, 57 in favour, while Prime Minister Pál Teleki and others stayed away.
After the League of Nations Council upheld a complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Bethlen government replaced the nationality quota with social categories by Act XIV of 1928. Some historians call the law the “zeroth” Jewish law, the forerunner of the anti-Jewish laws from 1938.