Homályzónák Zones d' Ombre - MEK - Országos Széchényi Könyvtár

As for some essential details of this ‘Jewish over-schooling’, it is important to note thatJews were decisively more ‘over-represented’ in national institutions of higher learningthan abroad. This contradicts sharply the stereotypical image of ‘cosmopolitan Jews’,preferring Western education to the one locally available, though, obviously enough it iseasy to find traces of strong attraction exerted on Jews by some preeminent faculties orvocational academies in Vienna or Berlin (like the Faculties of Medicine). It is also remarkablethat the over-representation of Jews among high school graduates was much moreimportant in the provinces (as in column 2 : 24 % as against 4,6 % in the provincialpopulation) than in the capital city (as in column 3 : 31 % as against 23 % in the Budapestpopulation). This is an indication of more powerful waves of educational mobility emergingfrom the countryside than from the main urban concentration of Jews in Hungary.Still the Jewish student body gathered essentially in Budapest with some 35 % of all studentsin the classical university and as much as 42 % in the Polytechnic.Lutherans were the second ethnic-religious cluster to be most often over-representedin higher education, especially those of Hungarian and German background. Althoughtheir quantitative preeminence is much less spectacular than that of Jews in the nationaleducational market, their presence is remarkable abroad, most visibly in Germany. Therethe cultural affinities between Hungarian Lutherans and Prussian-Lutheran universitiesappear to predominate.But, more generally, a level of significant over-representation in higher education is atypical feature of those of German background, including Catholic Germans (Swabians)as witnessed in the last line of the table (see Table 1). There again this is most apparentin the Budapest institutions of higher learning (especially at the Polytechnic University)and abroad, most particularly in Vienna where the ‘Germanic cluster’—some 12 % of thepopulation exceeded two-thirds of those in the student body.While other ‘Western Christians’ take only average positions among candidates tohigher studies, Eastern Christians (mostly of Romanian, Ruthenian-Ukrainian or Serbianorigin) appear to be systematically under-represented. Thus is completed a veritable hierarchyof chances of access to advanced education in the Dualist period with Jews on thetop, followed with a distance by Lutherans and more generally Germans, other Catholicsand Calvinists forming the average and Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox remainingin the rearguard.This very marked pattern of quantitative educational inequalities is closely matchedpositively by qualitative disparities as demonstrated in the second collection of surveyresults on average marks obtained in the main intellectual subjects (and—negatively—insports) by boys of the same socio-cultural categories as above in the 8 th classes of highschools (gymnasiums and Realschulen) in the years 1850–1918. It must be duly stressedthat the hierarchy of intellectual performance has proved to be exactly the same as theabove exposed rank order of frequencies of access to institutions of advanced learning.Behind the fac a d e o f the Liber al Stat e : e thnic an d r e l i g i o us i n e q ua l i t i e s o f elite e d u c at i o n in Dua l is t Hung ary215