Introduction

The rights withdrawn from Jews under the quota system established in September 1920 by the numerus clausus law were ones that had previously been thought to enshrine the unalienable equal rights of Jews in Hungarian society. The law elevated to the plane of government policy the idea that the so-called “Jewish question” could, and should, only be resolved by extraordinary legal measures applied exclusively to Jews, or in other words, by special “Jewish Laws,” as Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws were called. For this reason, the significance of the numerus clausus went beyond the walls of the universities and signaled the start of a new period for Hungarian Jews, one fraught with danger.