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A Jewish quota was a discriminatory racial quota designed to limit or deny access for Jews to various institutions. Such quotas were widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries in developed countries and frequently present in higher education, often at prestigious universities.
Some universities in Canada, notably McGill University, Université de Montréal and the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, had longstanding quotas on the number of Jews admitted to the respective universities. McGill University’s strict quota was the longest-running, having been officially adopted in 1920 and remaining in place until the late 1960s. [1]
In Germany, a whole series of numerus clausus resolutions were adopted in 1929 on the basis of race and place of origin, not religion. [2]
On 25 April 1933, the Nazi government introduced a 1.5% quota for new admissions of German non-Aryans—ie., essentially of German Jews—as core issue of a law claiming to generally limit the number of (Aryan and non-Aryan) students admitted to high-schools (höhere Schulen) and universities. In addition, high-schools and universities deemed to have more students than required for the professions for which they were training their students were required to reduce their student enrollment; in doing so, they had to reach a maximum of 5% of German non-Aryan students. The law was supposedly enacted to avoid overcrowding schools and universities, [3] which cited apparent concerns at the time that large numbers of students would decrease the quality of higher education in Germany. At the beginning of 1933, about 0.76% of the German population was Jewish, but more than 3.6% of German university students were Jewish, this number having steadily declined from over 9% in the 1880s. [4] After 30 July 1939, Jews were no longer permitted to attend German public schools at all, and the prior quota law was eliminated by a non-public regulation in January 1940. [5] p. 193
In addition to their strong and predominantly antisemitic agenda, the law and subsequent regulations were temporarily used to limit general university access to other groups that were not deemed "non-Aryan", as the name of the law implied. Starting in 1934, a regulation limited the overall numbers of students admitted to German universities, and a special quota was introduced reducing women's admissions to a maximum of 10%. Although the limits were not entirely enforced, the women's quota stayed a bit above 10% mainly because a smaller percentage of men than women accepted their university admissions, which made it approximately twice as hard for women to enter a university career than for men with the same qualification. [6] S. 80ff. After two semesters, these admission limits were revoked, however, leaving in place the non-Aryan regulations. [5] p. 178
The Numerus Clausus Act was introduced in 1920, under the government of Pál Teleki. It was said that the ethnic makeup of student bodies must meet the ethnic rate of population. Limitations were relaxed in 1928. Racial criteria in admitting new students were removed and replaced by social criteria. Five categories were set up: civil servants, war veterans and army officers, small landowners and artisans, industrialists, and the merchant classes. [7]
See Numerus clausus in Poland and Ghetto benches.
Numerus Clausus was not introduced by law, [8] but it was adopted by students in the universities Cluj, Bucharest, Iasi and Cernauti.
Numerus Clausus was enacted in 1887, stating that the share of Jewish students should be no more than 10 percent in cities where Jews were allowed to live, 5 percent in other cities, and only 3 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These limitations were removed in the spring of 1917 after the tsar's abdication during the early phase of the Russian revolution of 1917–1918 (the so-called February Revolution of 1917); later, in the late 1940s, during the initial phase of the Cold War and the tide of the anti-"rootless cosmopolitan" campaign, a de facto gross discrimination of Jewish applicants was reintroduced in many institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union until Perestroika. [9] [10] [11] [12]
Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. [13] Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933, [14] raised the alarm about a ‘Jewish problem’ when the number of Jewish students grew from six percent to twenty-two percent between 1908 and 1922. [15] Lowell argued that a "limit be placed on the number of them who later be admitted to the university." [16] The implementation of a quota on the number of Jews was not unique to Harvard. After Harvard’s 1926 announcement about instating a "new admissions policy [that] would place great emphasis on character and personality, the Yale Daily News praised its decision and put forward its own version of how Yale should select its students in a major editorial, ‘Ellis Island for Yale.’ It called on the university to institute immigration laws more prohibitive than those of the United States government." [17] According to historian David Oshinsky, writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all." [18] As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him" enrolled in New York University instead. [19] Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead.
According to Dan Oren's book, Joining the Club — A History of Jews and Yale, Yale University's informal admissions policy to restrict the school's Jewish student body to around 10 percent ended in the early 1960s. [20] [21]
In 1940, the government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia enacted the Decree on the Enrollment of Persons of Jewish Descent at the University, Secondary School, Teacher Training College and Other Vocational Schools which limited the proportion of Jewish students to the proportion of Jews in the total population. [22]
Racial quotas in employment and education are numerical requirements or quotas for hiring, promoting, admitting and/or graduating members of a particular racial group. Racial quotas are often established as means of diminishing racial discrimination, addressing under-representation and evident racism against those racial groups or, the opposite, against the disadvantaged majority group. Conversely, quotas have also been used historically to promote discrimination against minority groups by limiting access to influential institutions in employment and education.
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Numerus clausus is one of many methods used to limit the number of students who may study at a university. In many cases, the goal of the numerus clausus is simply to limit the number of students to the maximum feasible in some particularly sought-after areas of studies with an intent to keep a constant supply of qualified workforce and thus limit competition. In historical terms however, in some countries, numerus clausus policies were religious or racial quotas, both in intent and function.
Abbott Lawrence Lowell was an American educator and legal scholar. He was President of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933.
University admission or college admission is the process through which students enter tertiary education at universities and colleges. Systems vary widely from country to country, and sometimes from institution to institution.
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, also known as Civil Service Law, Civil Service Restoration Act, and Law to Re-establish the Civil Service, was enacted by the Nazi regime in Germany on 7 April 1933. This law, which followed Adolf Hitler's rise to power by two months and the promulgation of the Enabling Act by two weeks, constituted one of the earliest instances of anti-Semitic and racist legislation in Germany.
Antisemitism at universities has been reported and supported since the medieval period and, more recently, resisted and studied. Antisemitism has been manifested in various policies and practices, such as restricting the admission of Jewish students by a Jewish quota, or ostracism, intimidation, or violence against Jewish students, as well as in the hiring, retention and treatment of Jewish faculty and staff. In some instances, universities have been accused of condoning the development of antisemitic cultures on campus.
Count Kuno von Klebelsberg zu Thumburg was a Hungarian politician who served as Minister of the Interior and Minister of Culture of the Kingdom of Hungary between the two world wars.
The Kingdom of Hungary, referred to retrospectively as the Regency and the Horthy era, existed as a country from 1920 to 1946 under the rule of Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, who officially represented the Hungarian monarchy. In reality there was no king, and attempts by King Charles IV to return to the throne shortly before his death were prevented by Horthy. Hungary under Horthy was characterized by its conservative, nationalist, and fiercely anti-communist character. The government was based on an unstable alliance of conservatives and right-wingers. Foreign policy was characterized by revisionism — the total or partial revision of the Treaty of Trianon, which had seen Hungary lose over 70% of its historic territory along with over three million Hungarians, who mostly lived in the border territories outside the new borders of the kingdom, in the Kingdom of Romania and the newly created states of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Republican Austria, the successor of the former other half of the dual monarchy also received some minor territory from Hungary. Thus the post-1918 Kingdom can be described as a rump state. Hungary's interwar politics were dominated by a focus on the territorial losses suffered from this treaty, with the resentment continuing until the present.
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany began on April 1, 1933, and was claimed to be a defensive reaction to the anti-Nazi boycott, which had been initiated in March 1933. It was largely unsuccessful, as the German population continued to use Jewish businesses, but revealed the intent of the Nazis to undermine the viability of Jews in Germany.
Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany comprised several laws that segregated the Jews from German society and restricted Jewish people's political, legal and civil rights. Major legislative initiatives included a series of restrictive laws passed in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and a final wave of legislation preceding Germany's entry into World War II.
Ghetto benches was a form of official segregation in the seating of university students, introduced in 1935 at the Lwów Polytechnic. Rectors at other higher education institutions in the Second Polish Republic had adopted this form of segregation when the practice became conditionally legalized by 1937. Under the ghetto ławkowe system, Jewish university students were required under threat of expulsion to sit in a left-hand side section of the lecture halls reserved exclusively for them. This official policy of enforced segregation was often accompanied by acts of violence directed against Jewish students by members of the ONR.
Anti-Jewish laws have been a common occurrence throughout Jewish history. Examples of such laws include special Jewish quotas, Jewish taxes and Jewish "disabilities".
István Haller was a Hungarian politician, who served as Minister of Religion and Education between 1919 and 1920.
Economic antisemitism is antisemitism that uses stereotypes and canards that are based on negative perceptions or assertions of the economic status, occupations or economic behaviour of Jews, at times leading to various governmental policies, regulations, taxes and laws that target or which disproportionately impact the economic status, occupations or behaviour of Jews.
Anti-Jewish boycotts are organized boycotts directed against Jewish people to exclude them economical, political or cultural life. Antisemitic boycotts are often regarded as a manifestation of popular antisemitism.
The numerus clausus is a concept of property law which limits the number of types of right that the courts will acknowledge as having the character of "property". Several consequences follow from a right having the nature of property, as opposed to being a personal right, like a contract or obligation to pay compensation. Historically, the law has given privileged remedies to the holders of property rights over personal claims. These have included priority in payment from an insolvent debtor, a greater likelihood of being awarded specific performance, and security in remaining in possession of land or some other asset against termination of the right to possess. It holds especial importance in land law and corporate law.
An Asian quota is a racial quota limiting the number of people of Asian descent in an establishment, a special case of numerus clausus. It usually refers to alleged educational quotas in United States higher education admissions, specifically by Ivy League universities against Asian Americans, especially persons of East Asian and South Asian descent starting in the late 1980s. These allegations of discrimination have been denied by U.S. universities. Asian quotas have been compared to earlier claims of Jewish quotas, which are believed to have limited the admissions of a model minority from the 1910s to the 1950s. Jewish quotas were denied at the time, but their existence is rarely disputed now. Some have thus called Asian-Americans "The New Jews" of university admissions.
The history of Antisemitism in New Jersey dates to the establishment of the Province of New Jersey. Prior to the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Jewish people were excluded from living in many white Christian neighborhoods throughout New Jersey due to the use of restrictive covenants and quotas. Between the 1920s and 1950s, quota systems were instituted at universities in New Jersey to limit the number of Jewish people, including at Rutgers University and Princeton University. During the 2010s and 2020s, New Jersey has seen an increase in reported incidents of antisemitic vandalism and violence.
The history of Antisemitism in Connecticut dates to the establishment of the Connecticut Colony. Prior to the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Jewish people were excluded from living in many white Christian neighborhoods throughout Connecticut due to the use of restrictive covenants and quotas. Between the 1920s and 1960s, quota systems were instituted at universities in Connecticut to limit the number of Jewish people, including at Yale University and Wesleyan University. During the 2010s and 2020s, Connecticut has seen an increase in reported incidents of antisemitic vandalism and violence.
