ABSTRACT
For most Jews, educational mobility really occurred in the second and third generations as they entered public colleges. Quotas, along with social exclusions, first developed against Jews around the 1870s, and lasted in some form for almost one hundred years in the United States. Their history falls into three approximately thirty-year periods. The fact that quotas had been imposed on American Jews during a time of relative prosperity suggested that academic anti-Semitism arose from and was sustained by a combination of factors–petty social snobbery, intellectual mediocrity, and the fear of potential economic competition. Even though discrimination by elite private men's and women's colleges affected a relatively small percentage of the total number of Jewish students nationally, their admissions policies set the course for those of another 700 or so liberal arts colleges. Since the mid-nineteenth century, religious statistics for Harvard students showed a tremendous shift in the representation of different religious groups, especially after Harvard abolished compulsory chapel in 1886.
