On May 29, 1938, Hungary enacted its first anti-Jewish law. Although the country had not been occupied or annexed by Germany, under pressure from the Nazis it began to adopt restrictions on its Jewish population similar to the Nuremberg Laws implemented in September 1935. The first law set quotas for Jews who could be employed in a variety of commercial and professional fields.
In the 1930s, Hungary was indebted to Hitler’s Germany. The Treaty of Trianon, signed in Versailles, France, after World War I, had stripped the Kingdom of Hungary of about two-thirds of its territory and a similar fraction of its population. Most of the non-Hungarian ethnic groups that compromised the country’s population had disappeared when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The only minority group that remained were the Jews, who made up about five percent of the population.
In absolute numbers, the Jews, who had achieved equality before the law in Hungary only in 1867, were inconsequential but wielded a disproportionate influence. More than 25 percent of college students in the 1920s were Jewish, as were most members of the stock exchange and currency brokers. Many of the country’s industrial companies, too, were owned by Jewish bankers.
Admiral Miklos Horthy, the “regent” who became ruler of the country in March 1920, openly declared himself anti-Semitic and wrote that he found it “intolerable that everything here in Hungary, every factory, bank, great fortune, business, theater, press, commerce, etc., must be in Jewish hands and that the Jew must be the image that Hungary reflects, especially abroad ”.
When Germany began to redesign the borders of Central Europe, first by agreement and then by force, it returned to Hungary land it had lost in Versailles: part of Slovakia and Yugoslavia, subcarpathian Ruthenia, and northern Transylvania. In return, Horthy was expected to progressively place more restrictions on Jews, including the 100,000 who had converted to Christianity.
Already in 1920 Horthy had imposed a “numerus clausus” in Hungary, the first in Europe, limiting the percentage of university students who could be Jewish to its proportion in the general population: 5 percent.
The Jewish law of May 29, 1938 placed a limit of 20 percent on doctors, lawyers, journalists and engineers who could be Jewish; a dramatic decree considering that around 60 percent of doctors and 50 percent of lawyers professed that religion.
Less than a year later, on May 5, 1939, the second Jewish law was passed: it prohibited them from public employment and reduced the quotas allowed in many professions and commercial companies. Most significant was that, as in Germany, he gave a racial definition of Jewishness, so that anyone with more than one Jewish grandfather was defined as such.
Ultimately, Jews were deprived of their rights, prohibited from doing military service (fit Jewish men were forced to do forced labor), and marrying or having sexual relations with non-Jews was criminalized. However, when Hitler demanded that Horthy deport the Jews from his country (beyond the 20,000 who had been exiled and killed in 1941), he refused. For this and for other reasons, Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 and quickly set about deporting them (photo) and killing them. By the end of World War II, some 600,000 of the country’s 860,000 Jews had been killed.