ABSTRACT
The Jewish quota was a delicate subject in the statistical literature of the time, since Hungary was under pressure from the League of Nations, which accused it of racial discrimination for almost a decade. For this reason, the government’s figures left a lot of data obscure, and information was published more than once which was manipulated in such a way as to help the country’s defense against the League of Nations’ accusations. Government statisticians, however, did not use the numbers in a biased manner merely for foreign policy goals, but also because in the inner circles of higher education—at the universities and the ministry of education—people could see that the basic concept behind the law was discredited very quickly, within two or three years of its introduction. The law was meant to “make space” for Christian youth by excluding the Jews. But by the mid-1920s, it had become apparent that the gap that had developed due to the exclusion of Jewish students could not be filled with Christian secondary school graduates and that there were not enough Christian applicants to the universities to maintain the prewar student numbers.
