Strapping Christian undergraduates, some carrying rubber blackjacks, loitered in truculent groups, early one morning last week, before the lavish baroque facade of the University at Budapest. When Jewish students began to arrive, swinging off bright yellow trams in the Egyetem-ter (University Square), their Christian classmates menaced them with commands to "Go home!", hurled ribald taunts & insults.
Jewesses no less than Jews were barred from their classes by the bullying Christians. Many a Jewess wept openly, lamented loudly. Several Jews, goaded, but outnumbered, sought to dash rabbit-like in at an unguarded classroom door. Chased, they were collared, hoisted by trouser-seats, ejected from the University buildings. Two professors who sought to rescue them were pummeled, severely bruised.
Throughout Hungary this outburst of Jew-jostling was repeated, last week, by students at a dozen intermediate schools and two colleges. In Pecs (Peetsh), some Jewish undergraduates of the local college were driven to the extremity of barricading themselves and standing off their tormentors with threats to employ firearms. What could cause so national an outburst of student folly?
The Government of Premier Count Stephen Bethlen had simply made public the text of a bill revising the present statute under which the number of Jewish students in Hungarian colleges is limited to about 5% of the total student body. Close examination of the new bill showed that even if passed it would not increase the Jewish ratio by more than 1%. But in anti-Semitic Hungary one more percent in Jews can seem too many. Even so, why did not the Hungarian police protect harassed Jewish scholars, last week?
Jurists remembered that an old law, still operative, gives to Hungarian undergraduates the right of "self government," and prohibits the municipal police from entering university property. Only the national army police may make. arrests on a Hungarian campus; and they were not ordered out last week by Count Bethlen, a cold, closelipped, bony statesman inclined to let Conservatives and anti-Semities have loose rein.