Preface

The studies of this volume are concerned with long term processes of educational investments of various social clusters marked by their ethnic, denominational or social status. The focus is on Hungary as well as the rest of the Habsburg Monarchy, but not exclusively. The time span is related to the long period of relatively peaceful modernization following the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the emancipation of Jews and the industrial Gründerzeit of Central European societies in an imperial framework. This did not exclude, indeed it permitted and sometimes even supported - like precisely in the educational field - movements of nationalization or nation building.

Hungary constitutes of course a borderline historical case of nation building, since its titular elites represented a dominant ethnic minority only, while enjoying full sovereignty in all matters internal and sharing as equal partners the burden and the benefits of the 'common affairs' (money, defense and diplomacy) with the other parts of the Austrian Empire. The explicit Hungarian focus of these studies carry thus decisive thematic implications. Their main target has to do with denominational, ethnic and social inequalities of education in the only European society under modernization which was equally lacking ethnic and denominational majorities, while it continued to be ruled largely up to end by descendents of the historic gentry of Magyar ethnic stock or national commitment. This meant, obviously enough, that the ethnic and social dimensions of educational demand must be in the center of investigations destined to elucidate the question of schooling inequalities.

This explains why several of the essays here are dedicated to problems related to the involvement of ethnic and social clusters in schooling, especially in its most advanced echelons, universities. Three of the latter deal with the presence of Jews and two other with that of noblemen in higher education. But one could hardly enter into such rather singular problem areas without a close look at the institutional development of modern European educational systems, accomplished everywhere in the continent according to the two dominant patterns, the Humboldtian (Prussian) Forschungsuniversität and the post-Napoleonic Université. This was the task undertaken in the introductory study to the volume. But similarly I had to propose some basic methodological statements as well about the way the historical study of educational systems in a national society like Hungary can be approached thanks to the technical tools now at our disposal in our computerized post-modern era. This is done in the second study of the volume. It is followed by a statistical analysis of fundamental data gathered from our collective survey of Hungarian students engaged in higher education under the Dual Monarchy, particularly as regards the two best educated cultural-ethnic clusters of the time - Jews and Germans. But one cannot dispense with the analysis of anti-Semitism in Central Europe when bringing Jews in the focus, all the more because one of the explicit topics of contemporary Jew-hatred originated in and was constantly resourced by references to 'excessive Jewish education' and the alleged 'invasion by Jews' of the intellectual professions. Such developments were in reality part of the fundamental process of ethnically distinctive unequal modernization, opposing Jews to Gentiles in general, but also Germans to most other ethnic clusters in the non Germanic territories of East Central Europe. But the reference to Jews, historically a most mobile group, marked by both constrained and strategic mobility patterns, raises the issue of migration trends in modern Hungary with particular focus on minorities. This is discussed in a special paper pointing, there again, to significant ethnic and denominational differentials.

These rather general - though empirically documented - essays were meant to introduce the rest of the studies in the volume. They are indeed devoted to more specific issues, which correspond nevertheless to rather well known orientations of contemporary research in the social history of elites. From the various themes approached here two emerge as particularly important, while they are somewhat neglected by historians in this part of the world. One has to do with the territorial foci of educational inequalities in Hungary (Transdanubia) and in the Cisleithenian part of the Habsburg Monarchy - the latter implying regional comparisons of educational investment of Jews and non Jews in various Austrian provinces. The other topical area dealt with here in not less than five studies concerns student peregrinations abroad in the modern age. A vast array of particular subjects are broached here via statistical indicators. Two of them have been already evoked above about the highly conservative and on the whole limited educational investments of the Hungarian nobility abroad during the long 19th century. Two other essays examine the extent and the nature (by study choices and options for countries and individual institutions) of Hungarian migrant students in universities outside the frontiers, especially in Vienna and Germany. For this demonstration a remarkably precise set of prosopographical data banks is now available thanks to meticulous research efforts by Hungarian scholars. Finally, a West European case of the policies vis-à-vis foreign students - that of France under the Third Republic - is exposed to a systematic scrutiny. Here again we can identify the special questions raised by the strong - sometimes overwhelming - Eastern Jewish presence among the migrant clientele of higher educational institutions of the very country which consented to host the largest contingent of visiting students from abroad before the Second World War.