Page - 308 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

0 Michael Laurence Miller and many Jews were forced to pay the price for the Red Terror and other crimes com- mitted during the Soviet Republic. Indeed, the White Terror of 1919–1920, which sought to avenge the Red Terror, targeted leftists and Jews alike, often assuming the character of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Hungarian countryside. Many Hungarian Jews sought temporary refuge in Vienna and elsewhere during this tempestuous pe- riod. In total, the White Terror claimed the lives of roughly two thousand people, many of them Jews. In the Horthy era, Hungarian nationalism took a decidedly antisemitic turn, and “Judeo-Bolsheviks” were increasingly cast as a treasonous enemy that had brought about all of Hungary’s ills, including the Red Terror in 1919 and the Treaty of Tri- anon in 1920. The Treaty of Trianon, which was signed at Versailles on June 4, 1920, officially dismembered Hungary, transferring three-quarters of its pre-war territory and two-thirds of its pre-war population to Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and even Austria. Along with the loss of territory, Hungary lost most of its national mi- norities (Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, etc.), leaving the Jews as the most visible “other” in an increasingly homogeneous state. Christian nationalism, which was ascendant in the 1920s, viewed the Jewish “spirit” as foreign — and antithetical — to the Christian Hungarian spirit. This became apparent in the discourse surrounding the numerus clausus law of 1920. On September 22, 1920, the Hungarian National Assembly passed a numerus clau- sus law, with the ostensible aim of reducing the overcrowding in Hungary’s univer- sities. The influx of many Hungarian-speakers from Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the closing down of the Hungarian universities in Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) and Pozsony (Bratislava, Czechoslovakia) — which had belonged to pre-Trianon Hungary — placed an enormous strain on Hungary’s institutions of higher learning, particularly on the various universities in Budapest. But the numerus clausus law, which established a quota system for Hungary’s universities based on the proportion of individual races (népfaj) and nationalities (nemzetiség) in the general population, had a clearly antisemitic intent. Jews constituted only 6 % of Hungary’s general population, but almost 30 % of its university students and as much as 50 % of its medical students. Christian nationalists, who viewed universities as “workshops of genius,” saw the overrepresentation of Jews as the “de-Christianization of Hungary” For example, Lajos Szabolcsi, editor of the Hungarian Jewish weekly Egyenlőség (Equality) reports in his memoir that his wife and his wife’s family fled to Vienna for two months in 1919. See Lajos Szabolcsi, Két emberöltő, Budapest 1993, p. 273. The University of Kolozsvár was transferred to Szeged, the University of Pozsony was transferred to Pécs, and a new university was established in Debrecen, but these institutions suffered the problems of new- ness as well as the problems of overcrowding.