Central European University
The Migration of the Numerus Clausus Exiles. Hungarian Jewish Students in Interwar Europe
Agnes’s dissertation (expected defense: 2019), “The Migration of the Numerus Clausus Exiles. Hungarian Jewish Students in Interwar Europe”, investigates the connection between academic antisemitism, social mobility and migration through a sociological study of the “numerus clausus exiles” (students who left interwar Hungary due to the 1920 antisemitic numerus clausus law). Based on a database of over 1000 Hungarian students enrolled in universities abroad - Czechoslovakia, the First Austrian Republic, Weimar Germany and Fascist Italy - constructed by the author, the dissertation analyzes the social background of émigré students -most of whom were Jewish - and compares it with the social background of Jewish students enrolled in Hungarian universities in the same period. In this way important conclusions are made about the question who “made it into the Jewish quota” of Hungarian universities that was imposed by the 1920 “numerus clausus” law. Through the examination of interwar Hungarian media the dissertation also reviews the discourses related to the student migration provoked by the numerus clausus and compares them with narratives of students concerned which were constructed in students’ ego documents, often memoirs and autobiographies that they wrote decades later as Shoah survivors. Finally, based on databases of Shoah victims and survivors, the last chapter follows up the life trajectories of students who between the two world wars studied in universities abroad as the “exiles of the numerus clausus”.
Ágnes Kelemen is an Assistant Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest. She was a Leo Baeck Fellow in 2016–2017 and earned her Ph.D. from the Central European University in 2019. She is the author of Hungarian Students in Exile: Jews, Leftists, and Women, 1920–1938, a forthcoming monograph to be published by Indiana University Press.
2015- Ph.D. program in Comparative History, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
2014-2015 Fellowship at Paidiea-The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, Stockholm.
2012-2014 Master of Arts in Nationalism Studies with a specialization in Jewish Studies, Central European University, Budapest
2008-2012 Bachelor of Arts in History and Religious Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest