This volume goes some distance to meet a clear need in historical scholarship on Central and East-Central Europe and the Jewish experience there during the interwar period. Political voices raised calls for imposing limits on Jewish enrollments in advanced education in most countries where there were sizable Jewish minorities. The rightwing government that came to power in Hungary in 1919 after the communist interlude adopted as early as 1920 a numerus clausus law targeting all “national” minorities. In Romania, antisemitic rhetoric was common in political debates from the late nineteenth century onward, and various discriminatory measures were enacted after the late 1870s. Calls for limits on Jews in higher education and the learned professions increased in the expanded Romania after 1918 in opposition to government efforts to comply with the minority treaty accepted in 1919 and League of Nations policies. In Poland, the National Democratic Party and other groups on the right advocated strict quotas on Jews studying in universities or entering learned professions, some even calling for total exclusion of Jews. Despite much debate, the Polish parliament never approved any formal legislation for this, but some universities, such as in Poznań, implemented their own quotas. Up to now, historians have treated these developments in national histories and studies of the Jewish experience in one or another country, but to this reviewer’s knowledge, no book-length comparative treatment of the quota issue has appeared previously.

Most of the essays included in this collection originated in a conference held in 2020 by the Central European University in Budapest. The book provides broad treatment of the issue for East-Central Europe, although only the introductory chapter and the short afterword by Michael L. Miller and Judith Szapor treat the debates over discriminatory quotas and efforts to enact them in an explicitly comparative way. Miller and Szapor helpfully frame the subject broadly in both time and space. They examine advocacy beginning already in the late nineteenth century for quotas both to restrict enrollments of some population groups and to advance the representation of others. They point to the precedent of developments in tsarist Russia and the quotas to limit Jewish enrollments that many American universities imposed formally or informally during the early twentieth century. Jeremy King’s well-grounded chapter traces developments in the Habsburg monarchy before 1918 that prepared the ground for the public debates and policy initiatives in the successor states. All but one of the remaining thirteen chapters examine events in one or another single country.

Particularly welcome is the inclusion here of substantial chapters by the late scholars Mária M. Kovács (1953–2020) and Andor Ladányi (1928–2021). These offer in English classic studies of the quota issue in Hungary after 1919, which the two historians published otherwise in Magyar. Kovács writes with precision, clarity, and scarcely concealed passion about the strong impulses in antisemitic Hungarian nationalist circles to implement and then maintain limits on Jewish enrollments in university education despite international disapproval. She demonstrates how the Bethlen government won kudos abroad for formally lifting the nationality quota from law in 1928 even while it substituted a new quota system based on the occupation of prospective students’ fathers, which effectively preserved limits on Jewish enrollments. Ladányi’s chapter adds a carefully detailed narrative of the Hungarian government’s policy initiatives and legislation through the 1930s regarding the quota system and the resulting developments in major universities.

Other chapters provide good treatment of the political and legal history of quotas in other countries, but for many readers, some of the freshest and most fascinating reading comes in the chapters devoted to reactions and adaptations to the Hungarian quota system by Jewish families and their sons and daughters. Ágnes Katalin Kelemen describes how the German Technical College in Brno became a magnet for Hungarian Jewish students who could not study at home and, for a number of them, a launching pad for engagement in radical socialist and communist politics. Judith Szapor offers vivid short biographies of six Hungarian Jewish women who struggled against the impediments they faced both as women and as Jews to get advanced education and make professional careers.

One can hope that the publication of this volume will stimulate further research on the roots and dynamics of efforts in Europe and other parts of the world to implement quotas in advanced education, whether against certain population groups or in favor of others. Quota policies represent a prime example of social engineering, which many modern states have used their great powers to attempt. This book is surely welcome in light of the salience of the issue in Central and East-Central Europe during the early twentieth century. With some regret, though, one must note that sloppy editing of the English style in a number of chapters here serves poorly both the authors and readers.