Jewish quota

Jewish quota was a percentage that limited the number of Jews in various establishments. In particular, in 19th and 20th centuries some countries had Jewish quotas for higher education, a special case of Numerus clausus.

Jewish educational quotas could be state-wide law or adopted only in certain institutions, often unofficially. The limitation took the form of total prohibition of Jewish students, or of limiting the number of Jewish students so that their share in the students' population would not be larger than their share in the general population. In some establishments, the Jewish quota placed a limit on growth rather than set a fixed level of participation to be achieved.

According to historian David Oshinsky, on 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."[1] As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him" enrolled in New York University instead.[2]

Jews who wanted an education used various ways to overcome this discrimination: bribing the authorities, changing their religion, or traveling to countries without such limitations. In Hungary, for example, 5,000 Jewish youngsters (including Edward Teller) left the country after the introduction of Numerus Clausus.

One American who fell victim to the Jewish quota was late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, who was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead.

Countries legislating limitations on the admission of Jewish students

Apart from their strong and predominant anti-Semitic agenda, the law and its subsequent regulations were temporarily indeed used to limit general university access, i.e. including "non-Aryans" (Jews), as the name of the law implied. Starting 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 percent. Although the limits were not entirely enforced—women's quota stayed a bit above 10 percent mainly because a smaller percentage of men than women accepted their university admissions—, they made it for women approximately twice as hard to enter a university career than for men with the same qualification.[6]S. 80ff. After two semesters, the admission limits were revoked, however, leaving in place the non-Aryan regulations.[5]p. 178
For additional information in German, see the article at the German Wikipedia

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