Victor Karady

Peregrinations of Transylvanian Students in the late Dual Monarchy. (A Case of Confessional Inequalities in Elite Training)[1]

Preliminary remarks

This study concerns the places chosen by would-be members of educated elites from Transylvania for their higher studies in the pre-1918 decades, following their confessional standing. Some initial specification of all meaningful terms of this statement must be made before starting our investigation in this matter.

’Students from Transylvania’ refers to those candidates to university graduation born in the region, independently from their residence or places of secondary education – two other definitions of regional ties usually indicated in the files of academic institutions resorted to in this survey. The scope of places of learning is limited to the three universities proper in Hungary (Universities of Budapest and Kolozsvár/Cluj as well as the Polytechnical University in Budapest), but to all kinds of institutions of advanced learning in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy, Germany and Switzerland – the main targets of student peregrinations from Transylvania in the period under scrutiny. Thus, the scope of our study excludes the ten odd Law academies, vocational (agricultural, commercial, military) colleges and the schools of theology (the Roman Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Budapest included). The information exploited here is simply not available for these non university type institutions, where the entitlements granted with the degrees were less large than in universities, the length of study usually shorter (except in Law academies and in some theological seminaries) and access conditions not always demanding the completion of secondary education with matura, unlike in universities since the 1849 imperial grounding law on education (Organisationsentwurf or Entwurf) The chronological scope of the study is variably restricted to the two to five decades preceding 1918, since the relevant data sets at my disposal have been elaborated for unequal periods of time. Finally, the confessional focus applied here is meant explicitely to stand for the study of the impact of ethnicity. There is indeed a strong correlation, almost an overlap, between religious and ethnic status in Transylvania (except for Orthodox Romanians and the small Serbian minority on the one hand, Uniate Romanians and Ukrainians on the other hand, as the only relatively significant exceptions to this rule). If we had based the study on ethnic data, the differences between Slavs and Romanians among students would have made not much of an impact, since the numbers of students concerned were extremely small, while such distinctions – very important in educated elite groups – as between Magyarized and non Magyarized Jews, Germans and others would have been lost.

With these technical clarifications we have not broached as yet the very significance of locations or localities in university studies. The place of learning had always assumed considerable weight in strategies of higher education because of its investment by qualitative references due to the historically accumulated symbolic assets of the institutions (among them their very seniority or anteriority in historic terms), the scholarly prestige of its staff, its urban or natural environment, the quality of its invested equipment - libraries, laboratories, etc.). But beyond all this, the location could also matter on the strength of its ideological halo or associations outright. In the period of nation states and mounting movements of nationalist self-identification, many universities – like several other cultural institutions (academies, theatres, museums, libraries, etc.) underwent a process of fundamental ’nationalization’, not to mention the possibly confessional ties of many universities, given the fact that most ancient university foundations were due to ecclesiastical authorities (above all the pope) or tu princes with strong denominational persuasion. Ethnic and confessional minorities and majorities could have thus developed very different strategies of student peregrinations – options for places of learning – following a number of motivations as above, besides obvious considerations of costs, but also because of their acceptance or rejection of the latent ideological contents associated with the places of learning accessible to them.

In this context the very notion of peregrination appears to be problematic by itself in socio-historical terms.

Given the absolute scarcity of universities before the mid 20th century, the majority of students anywhere had to come to their place of study from far away. In the international academic free market, which emerged in Europe after the fall of feudalism, there were no legal barriers in the options for places of learning. Such choices were thus governed by a balance of factors cited hitherto. But most of these choices involved some displacement and the ensuing experience of alienation, except for those students – always a minority, to be sure, in Transylvania during the Dual Monarchy - who happened to live close to the university premises. Due to their general distance during their studies from their home environment, most students of those days were still temporary migrants in university cities. The distance from home could be, obviously enough, not only of geographical nature but entail a measure of cultural or social alienation which – one should remember – had been the lot of the quasi-totality of students before modern times, that is before the accelerated wave of urbanisation generated by the process of industrialization. It was a fairly recent development indeed, ere the first World War, that an increasing proportion of students were selected among residents in the town of their university. Now in a uniquely multi-cultural region, like Transylvania, with a largely non Magyar population but just one Magyar language university up to 1918, a good part of the potential student clientele had to face a measure of cultural alienation – in fact a ’deculturation’ of sorts – while studying in a language different from their home idiom. This applied to Jews, Romanians, Saxons, Serbians or Ukrainians – though differently following their degree of ’Magyar acculturation’ (notably bilingual or multi-lingual competences).

But this implied that for non Magyar students there was no real difference in cultural terms (whatever other differences there may have been) between attending the University of Kolozsvár/Cluj or that of Vienna. Except for the travel distance, the degree of linguistic alienation was the same, there were no political frontiers to be crossed, there were no ’national associations’ atteched to studies in the imperial university and, moreover, the diploma to be obtained could be largely used in the whole Habsburg Empire (or even beyond, for some of them, given the prestige of the biggest academic centre in this part of the world). Thus the problem of peregrinations can be considered, for many students belonging to ethnic minorities without institutions of higher education of their own, as a general problem and not a specific one, as for students from the ruling majority.

One can add that for some minority students, members of the Oriental Christian Churches (to which most Romanians, Serbians and Carpatho-Ukrainians from Transylvania actually belonged), the experience of cultural alienation during studies in a Hungarian, Austrian or other Western university (in Switzerland or Germany, to name the most important places of learning for them) derived from denominational sources as well. The whole scholarly culture developed in modern universities was historically rooted in Western Christianity. In the long 19th century still most of these were actually flanked by a theological faculty, either Roman Catholic or Protestant – except some lately founded ones, like those in post-Napoleonic France or…Kolozsvár/Cluj. But Oriental Christians could feel estrangement as outsiders of sorts in these universities due to the fact that most fellow students around them would be either Western Christians or Jews. Going to Kolozsvár/Cluj for them represented an experience close to going to Vienna in this respect too.

Moreover one should not forget that higher studies could be a test of resistance to social pressure too for students extracted from the lower social strata, especially for peasant sons whose ’social loneliness’ in an environment dominated by offspring of an educated middle class or even high class majority was intensified by alienation in urban life proper. We know that in Transylvania Romanian and Slav student had on the average much lower social class profile than their Jewish or Western Christian fellow students – due, among other things, to the efficiency of ’sponsored mobility’ attributable to Romanian Foundations (Gojdu, Nasaud, etc.) supporting students[2], so much so that an exceptionally large proportion of them originated from the peasantry.[3]

To sum up, the geographical displacement primarily involved in the notion of student peregrinations was far from being the unique aspect of the estrangement while attending a foreign university. It must be complemented by its ethnic-national, denominational and social aspects. This applied especially for students of Eastern Christian background, like Romanians and Slavs in Transylvania. For the latter attending any university in the Habsburg Empire or in the whole Germanic academic market must have comprised not quite incomparable levels of alienation, however different they could appear in concrete terms.

Confessional disparities in the intellectual professions

Inequalities of cultural nature in student peregrinations cannot be understood without the clarification of the general pattern of cultural inequalities in matters educational. One must though always keep in mind in that kind of investigation that cultural differences have been themselves historically dependent on other kinds of differentials typifying cultural (ethnic, denominational) clusters. Some of them are hard core ’objective’ variables, like the one that was referred to above (social origins), among many others, like residence (communicational distance from university centres), family size (the number of children being correlated to basic educational investments in the education of each of them), gender ratio in the family (female children having been largely excluded from higher education during most of the period under scrutiny), the social composition of kins (the presence of intellectuals in the extended family enhancing the chances of access to advanced education), etc.

Unfortunately most of these variables are beyond empirical control at the present stage of research. But we have at our disposal a remarkably refined set of information on the confessional distribution of ’non manually active’ professional groups, the average level of education of which is well attested in contemporary Hungarian censuses. Though even there, levels of education differed vastly from one category to another – and these differences have been duely demonstrated [4]- all ’non manuals’ share nevertheless a mean degree of education making them sharply distinct from the rest of the population (except for the most privileged categories of the propertied strata). Moreover, the level of edzucation of some of these ’non manual’ categories is strictly connected to their professional standing, like the liberal professionals (necessarily endowed with university degrees), priest (with theological training in academies or seminaries run by respective church authorities), etc.

Table 1

The distribution of selected ‘intellectual’ professions in Transylvania by denominations (1900)[5]

Roman Greek Greek Luthe- Calvi- Unita- Jews all

C a t h o l i c s Ortho- rans nists rians

dox

Private employees (in- 20,6 4,6 6,3 29,3 10,4 5,9 62,0 18,6

dustry, trade, banks)

free professionals 5,3 4,8 3,2 7,0 5,9 6,6 8,6 5,7

employees in transports 20,9 2,3 1,6 6,5 14,4 12,4 12,3 10,6

civil servants, public

employees 28,0 15,0 17,5 13,5 27,7 26,8 6,0 17,9

priests, clerics 6,6 40,5 42,6 13,9 15,2 18,5 4,7 20,1

primary school teachers 14,0 36,0 37,5 24,9 23,1 25,9 6,0 24,0

highschool teachers 4,5 1,8 1,8 4,9 3,6 3,9 0,5 3,2

___________________________________________________________________________

all 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0

numbers 3295 2364 2012 2260 2848 541 1309 14.629

A/ % of intellectuals 22,5 16,2 13,7 15,4 19,5 3,4 8,9 100,0

B/ % of all economi-

cally active men 13,4 28,7 30,2 8,8 14,5 2,6 1,8 100,0

representation index

( = A : B) 1,68 0,56 0,45 1,75 1,34 131 4,94

Table 1. offers for the last decade of the Dual Monarchy a detailed overview of the relative proportion of the ‘non manually active’ or ‘intellectuals’ within the professionally active Transylvanian male population (last two lines) on the one hand, the internal set-up or the quantitative distribution of various categories of these ‘intellectuals’ among all ‘non manuals’ (first eight lines) on the other hand, the categories figured being broken down by religious affiliations. ‘Non manuals’ are defined here exclusive of ‘independents’ in agriculture, industry, trade, transportation, etc.

If we compare data of the last two lines, a clear pattern of unequal representation of ‘intellectuals’ among confessional groups becomes already quite apparent. The most striking over-representation of ‘intellectuals’ is found among active Jews – five times more than their share among active males. This is not an astonishing finding, since it is confirmed elsewhere in Central Europe wherever there are data on Jewish social stratification, the intellectual professions being major targets of Jewish mobility in the period intensive assimilation following (often even preceding) legal emancipation. The over-representation of Lutherans -less drastic, though very significant – comes seconds after that of Jews, followed closely by the Roman Catholics and – at some distance – by the other two ‘Western Christian’ clusters. The two Eastern Christian groups are in contrast poorly represented here, the Orthodox even less than the Uniates. These data designate thus a clear hierarchy of the weight of active men with at least some secondary or higher education. With the very small Jewish group on the top, the best endowed clusters are the Lutherans (Saxons for most of them) and the Roman Catholics (mostly of Magyar stock). The two other supposedly ‘purely Magyar’ Western Christian groups display a similar but less prominent position, while the Eastern Christians (with most of the Romanians and Slavs) fall much behind the rest.

This hierarchy of the global share of ‘intellectuals’ is clearly replicated in the internal distribution of the various categories cited as ‘non manuals’. Here again the main oppositions and distinctions follow a pattern comparable to the global representation of ‘intellectuals’.

The Jews are here again absolutely alone with their majority in private economic employment and with a correspondingly low share among all other categories, except for the free professions (lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers, etc.) – among which the Jewish representation is the largest, compared to all other confessional clusters. Lutherans also stand out of the Western Christian groups with over two fifths of them in private economy (including the semi-private category of employees in transportation) or in the professions as well as a very strong presence among teachers (up to 30 %). Roman Catholics come third in the line here too with a similarly high proportion in private or semi-private economic functions (especially in transportation) and in the professions. But Roman Catholics are also prominent by displaying the largest share among civil servants of all other confessional groups. Calvinists and Unitarians show a passably low representation in the private economy, but a fairly high one among civil servants, clerics and teachers. Oriental Christians are on the other extreme pole of this spectrum. The bulk of their ‘intellectuals’ were active in the clerical and teaching corps, the two being – as it is well known - institutionally connected, since most of the teachers were engaged in schools run by the respective Churches.

Thus the internal structure of the intellectual clusters presents an even sharper confessional polarisation than the mere share of intellectuals in the active population. Eastern Christians, with very few free professionals or high school teachers – for which a university degree was already a must in the Dual Monarchy – could be but weakly present among students of the same period, in contrast to Jews, Lutherans or Roman Catholics, whose share in the ‘higher’ intellectual professions was visibly much more significant. Given such basic inequalities, one can also presume that these patterns may have left an imprint on placement and peregrination strategies of the students concerned.

Peregrination strategies

Thanks to large scale preliminary research I have carried out in the last few years together with Peter Tibor Nagy on graduates in Hungarian higher education in the pre-socialist regime, going back to the 1870s in our archival surveys, as well as the long investigations accomplished by László Szögi and his collaborators on students from Hungary abroad before 1818, we have an almost exhaustive data bank at our disposal on the clientele of advanced learning born in the Carpathian Basin in the Dualist period.[6] This includes a number of personal data in form of electronic files on students and graduates, so that most (if not quite all) the places of study can be clearly identified.[7] Table 2 below shows the results for those born in Transylvania.[8]

Table 2

Transylvanian Born Students and Graduates in Selected Universities by Religion (1870-1918) and the confessional distribution of the Population in Transylvania (1910)[9]

Confession	Budapest Universi ty[10] 1870- 1918	Budapest Polytech-nics 1870-1918[11]	Kolozsvár University[12] 1872-1918			Germany[13] 1867-1880 1895-1914	Vienna[14] 1890-1918	Transylva-nian popu-lation in 1910[15]
Roman Catholic	35,9	37,8		30,5	24,0		25,2	13,4
Calvinist	24,2	17,3	28,6			5,2	4,4	14,7
Lutheran	10,9	21,2	10,6			65,0	48,8	9,0
Jewish	11,4	12,8	7,8			2,5	4,2	2,1
Unitarian	3,2	7,1	7,2			0,7	0,5	2,6
Greek Catholic	9,6	2,2	9,9			0,3	6,5	27,9
Greek Orthodox	5,1	2,2	5,3			2,4	11,0	30,2
All	100,0	100,0	100,0			100,0	100,0	100,0
% of Tran- sylvanians in total	4,6 %	5,7 %	44,7 %			26,3 %	18,2 %	14,9 %[16]

We can start our study with the comparison of the last column of the table (population distribution) with all the others (displaying the distribution of student clusters), giving the general trends of representation of Transylvanian confessional groups among the student population in the Dual Monarchy. A very contrasting set of patterns can be thus drawn, in part quite comparable to our findings above as to the general representation of religious groups among ‘intellectuals’, in part significantly different from this.

The first observation here concerns the general share of Transylvanians in the various student bodies in Hungary and outside (last line of Table 2). There is no reason to be astonished that students from Transylvania gathered in Kolozsvár/Cluj and much less in Budapest. It is though more interesting to note that they were almost as rare in the Budapest Polytechnical University as in the classical university of the Hungarian capital city, though the former was a unique institution recruiting its students country wide, without any institutional competition in the kingdom, except in Austria or abroad. The scarcity of Transylvanian attendance at the Budapest Polytechnics may be attributed to the relative under-industrialization of Transylvania, its backwardness in terms of general economic development, generating less demand than elsewhere in the country for the engineering professions. As a contrast, one can see that Transylvanians were strongly over-represented among students abroad in Vienna and even more in Germany. Thus special motivations must have operated for Transylvanians to prefer Germanic institutions of higher education to Hungarian ones, when they decided to pursue their studies outside of their region of birth.

Such motivations can be easily objectified when looking at the distribution of students in various places of learning by religion. Vast disparities following quite similar patterns as above between Jews, Western and Eastern Christians are manifest here too. Jews were rather strongly over-represented everywhere (but much less in Germany than elsewhere), while Lutherans an Roman Catholics appeared also in larger percentages in every university network cited than in the population. The presence of Lutherans abroad appeared to be spectacular indeed, since they made up close to half of all students among Transylvanians in Vienna and up to two thirds of them in Germany. Calvinists and Unitarians were over-represented though only in Hungary, and their students showed up very rarely beyond the borders of the kingdom. Eastern Christians were underrepresented in all places of learning under scrutiny, but the distribution of students belonging to the two confessions differed significantly. Greek Orthodox displayed a relatively substantial presence in Vienna, exceeding that of Kolozsvár/Cluj, while the Uniates were more visible in the two classical Hungarian universities in Kolozsvár/Cluj and Budapest.

These flagrant inequalities can be interpreted both in the logic of cultural and linguistic affinities and competence on the one hand, that of national antipathies or loyalties on the other hand. The two could of course combine their effects for preferential options of several clusters cited in Table 2.

The logic of cultural affinities did obviously play some role in the decisively frequent choice made by Transylvanian Lutherans (mostly Saxons) for institutions of higher education with German language of tuition. Conversely, Calvinists and Unitarians (mostly of exclusively Magyar stock) may have avoided the same foreign universities in larger numbers because of their lack of the indispensable linguistic skills to do there meaningful higher studies. The same could apply, though less radically, to Roman Catholics, the vast majority of whom were of Hungarian background (since 81 % of them were speaking only Hungarian in 1900[17]) even if there could be a few German speakers, presumably mostly Swabians from the Banat among them as well[18]. Roman Catholics were indeed also less often found abroad than in Hungarian universities. The cultural-linguistic connection between German ethnicity and the choice of Germanic universities is thus well established. For Lutherans studying in German language Philosophical Faculties with teacher training programs, this option was clearly guided by an obvious market orientation. Such Lutheran-Saxon students prepared themselves to fill teaching positions available in the relatively large network of gymnasiums of the Transylvanian Universitas Saxorum.

But, incidentally, a more ideological motivation of similar choices can equally be discerned in the data of Table 2. Saxon-Lutherans could opt preferentially for Germanic places of learning, even when they spoke Hungarian, in order to avoid strongholds of Magyar cultural nationalism. This may be one of the reasons (besides modernist interest for technical studies) why they attended less often the classical universities in Hungary as compared the Budapest Polytechnics – the latter lacking or being less typical for such nationalist associations. But the same could apply even more to Greek Orthodox students of Romanian or Slav affiliation. It is indeed striking that the latter displayed the relatively highest score of presence in Viennese institution of higher education, possibly expressing a degree of Habsburg loyalties and – perhaps more importantly - their wish to keep away from (if not properly boycott) academic institutions of ‘Magyar imperialism’. Such option was much less marked for Uniate students, who – however they could feel about Magyar nationalism – were linked by religious persuasion but also by the preliminary schooling experience of most of them (as alumni of Hungarian Catholic gymnasiums) to the Catholic Church, dominated in the country by a Hungarian majority.

The options for study tracks abroad

Finally we must examine what students from Transylvanian actually studied. It is alas impossible to refer in this short article to all the study options involved, including Hungarian universities. But the observation of institution of higher education outside the country offers instructive cues about the nature of ‘qualitative inequalities’ in advanced learning following confessional membership. For this two sets of data are at our disposal on students in Vienna and in Germany during the outgoing decades of the Dual Monarchy. The tables demonstrate to what extent various places of learning, belonging apparently to exactly the same cultural sector of the international academic market, could lend themselves to extremely different types of usage by migrant students.

Table 3

Study Tracks of Transylvanian Born Students by Religion in the Universities of Vienna (1890-1918)[19]

	Engi- neering	Huma- nities, Sciences	Medicine Pharmacy	Law, State Sciences	Theo- logy	Other	total	N =
Roman Cath.	17	11	14	25	29	4	100	138
Uniates	27	6	31	27	6	2	100	48
Greek Orthod.	9	20	49	18	-	4	100	76
Calvinist, Unit.	11	22	33	33	-	-	100	9
Lutherans	19,3	10,1	40,1	14,2	8,9	7,2	100	357
Jews	18	9	62	9	-	3	100	34
All[20]	17,8	10,9	35,6	17,8	12,5	5,4	100
N =	122	75	244	122	86	37		686

Vienna, seat of the central educational agencies of the Dual Monarchy, attracted much less students from Transylvania, on the whole, compared to Germany (as attested by figures in the very last lines of Tables 3 and 4). Calvinists and Unitarians from the region were all but inexistent among students, in spite of their being clumped together in Table 3 and the relative rarity of Jews appears to be also quite exceptional here, given the very strong Hungarian-Jewish presence in Vienna from the rest of Hungary. In the imperial capital city the most frequent study option for Transylvanians was Medicine, followed by Law and Engineering. These privileged study choices applied to most confessional clusters except for Greek Orthodox (as for Engineering) and Roman Catholics (as for Medicine). But for the latter the Viennese Faculty of Catholic Theology was the most frequent option compared to all other disciplines. This is understandable, due to the prestige of a Faculty which played a major role in the recapture of souls during the century old process of Catholic Counter-Reformation. It is less obvious though, why Vienna had not attracted more Lutheran theologians at the turn of the previous century, since there was a special Lutheran Theological Faculty operating since 1821 (founded by the imperial government precisely to divert would-be Lutheran ministers from studies in Prussia). Thus, though their raw numbers differed vastly, for most confessional groups Vienna was important in the Dualist period above all because of its world famous medical school and, secondarily, its Polytechnic as well as its Law school.

In all these respects the distribution of Transylvanian students in Germany constituted a counterpoint of sorts, as demonstrated on Table 4.

Table 4

Study Tracks of Transylvanian Born Students by Religion in German Universities and Vocational Academies (1895-1918)[21]

	Engi- neering	Huma- nities, Sciences	Medicin Pharma- Cy	Law, State Sciences	Theo- logy	Other[22]	total	N =
Roman Cath.	16	28	10	24	-	20	100	64
Uniates	-	54	8	38	-	-	100	13
Greek Orthod.	19	53	10	11	3	3	100	62
Calvinist, Unit.	3	30	-	12	39	12	100	66
Lutherans	10,5	11,9	7,2	9,2	63,4	2,5	100	722
Jews	44	12	8	8	4	24	100	34
All[23]	10,8	18,0	10,2	15,6	42,2	3,4	100
N[24] =	263	440	250	375	1033	82		2446

Medicine appears, to start with, as a quite marginal study track, even as compared to the Philosophical Faculties (combining the humanities and the sciences), Law schools or engineering, the students of all the latter being on the whole moderately represented among those from Transylvania. The main option for them was theology, with over two thirds of all students. But theology in imperial Germany, the bulk of which was Lutheran Prussia, could be but Lutheran itself. Indeed, Lutheran students in Germany – much over half of all Transylvanian students in the Wilhelmine Reich (as shown on Table 2 above) – got engaged in theological faculties for a large majority of close to two-thirds of them. This overwhelming strength of Lutheran-Saxon presence among Transylvanians in German higher education automatically enhanced the representation of theology among the global study options under scrutiny. For Protestant students (including Calvinists and Unitarians as well) theology studies in the heart of the Lutheran world provided much more than purely symbolic gratifications. Since Prussian theological faculties were integral parts of universities, studies lasted four years and could lead to a doctorate, generating additional intellectual and social benefits, which were regarded as decisive for prospective candidates to membership in Protestant Church hierarchies. Such promotional profits were not secured by studies in simple divinity schools (theological academies) of the Hungarian Kingdom.

One has to remark the importance of the German Philosophical Faculties for all other religious clusters, Lutherans and Jews excluded. For the latter studies of the humanities and the sciences were in those times always a minor (if not necessarily a negligible) study choice, because the main thrust of teaching in the Philosophical Faculties aimed at the preparation for secondary school teachers’ degrees : the market of secondary schooling (especially the classical gymnasium network) being controlled by the state (as in Austria) or the Churches (as in Hungary), it was for most part out of reach for Jewish candidates. The secondary schools without Latin, mostly run by the Liberal state, accepted more often Jewish professors in their staff, but this remained a small sector only of the educational market concerned. It is notable that Eastern Christians together with Calvinists and Unitarians got engaged relatively much more often than others in the ‘philosophical’ track of German universities. For Greek Orthodox students this was true already in Vienna (as shown on Table 3.). There again, since German was one of the essential subjects in secondary education, taught throughout most of curriculum both in gymnasiums[25] and Realschulen[26] (without Latin), its study at the very source of German civilisation contributed to increase the attendance in the Philosophical Faculties of the Reich. But many Eastern Christians engaged in German studies could feel themselves justified to reroute their intellectual commitment to German universities, considered as ‘neutral’ as regards their possibly nationalist inclinations, as against an Austrian imperial academic centre, let alone a Hungarian one.

Conclusion.

This cursory investigation is a case study in the exploration of regional specificities together with confessional inequalities in higher education. Its main results cannot be mechanically extended over other regions and even less taken as a general insight into problems of unequal modernity according to lines of cultural background. Still, whatever ‘independent variables’ may be hidden behind confessional differences (like social class stratification, property distribution, degrees of urbanization, outside promotion and sponsorship of educational mobility, etc.), the fairly systematic disparities observed above attest to the relevance and legitimacy of two kinds of interrogation, which have remained hitherto far often ignored in the literature of contemporary social history. First, confessions constitute, by themselves, an at least partially independent determinant of educational attainments, which deserves to be analysed in its own right. Second, the structure - notably the mere special arrangement of the institutional market of advanced learning – is liable to modify, sometimes substantially, educational chances, strategies (in particular study options) and achievements of candidates to academic entitlements. One can add, though this lies outside the scope of the present essay, that both the confessional identity and the structure of the educational provision continue, after graduation, to affect - rather systematically and mostly in the same sense as before graduation -, the cluster specific conditions of professional orientation and success of those concerned.

[1] The surveys underlying this essay have benefited from the financial assistance of two Hungarian state agencies, the OTKA and the NKFP, together with that of the Research Support Scheme of the Central European University in Budapest.

[2] See V. Karady, L. Nastasa, The University of Kolozsvár/Cluj and the Students of the Medical Faculty (1872-1918), Cluj-Budapest-New York, Ethnocultural Diversity Resource Center, Central European University Press, 2004, pp. 142-149.

[3] In the Medical Faculty of the University of Kolozsvár/Cluj in 1872-1918 over 31 % of Orthodox and 18 % of Uniate students came from families active in agriculture, as against a mere 4,5 % of Roman Catholics, 5,4 % of Lutherans, 10,2, % of Calvinists and 5,2 % of Jews. See V. Karady, L. Nastasa, op. cit. pp. 121-132.

[4] For a detailed study of educational attainments of various social categories in 1910 see Magyar statisztikai közlemények 56, pp. 28-305, passim.

[5] Cf. Magyar statisztikai közlemények /Hungarian statistical reports/, 16, pp. 134-236 passim.

[5] Women could not be distinguished in the sources from male professionals but, obviously enough, most of these ’non manuals’ were men at that time for reasons related to the subsistence of the quasi-exclusion of women from most educational tracks leading to intellectual professions.

[6] For Hungary, I have resorted here only to data on students and graduates in universities proper, excluding students of law academies and vocational higher education. The latter are included though among data on higher educational agencies abroad (Austria, Germany).

[7] The only significant exception here concerns students in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Prague. For the first two the sources have not been explored as yet. But this may touch just a handful of students from Transylvania altogether. Contemporary statistics, published since 1881 on students from Hungary abroad, basically ignored all other countries beond Austria, Germany and Switzerland, presumably because of the very small numbers affected. A dozen odd students start to be signalled in the years after 1900 for France. Some 179 students from Transylvania studied in Germanic Swiss universities between 1867 and 1918 and 21 other ones in French Swiss universities, but there are no indication on religion in Swiss academic files. For Prague the relevant data have not yet been processed separately for students born in Transylvania.

[8] It must be reminded here too, that the place of birth is just one of the empirical definitions of regional ties in our prosopographical lists. Results could be somewhat different if we used the place of secondary studies (Matura) or father’s residence as indicators of territorial roots.

[9] Survey results. Only those students and graduates whose confession was identified in the sources. Raw data are not indicated here because they would refer to fundamentally different student populations. For the University of Budapest, the biggest training institution for students from Hungary, data concern graduates only. For the Budapest Polytechnics only students having passed at least one exam are cited, who would not necessarily become graduates. For the rest both graduates and students inscribed have been registered in the sources exploited.

[10] Graduates of the Faculties of Law and Medicine only. The main data source of the Philosophical Faculty (the files of the state exam for teacher’s degree in secondary schools) lacks information on religion, so that they had to be disregarded here. As to the students of the Catholic Theological Faculty – with Roman and Greek Catholics only –, they are unfit in this multi-confessional context for a meaningful comparison.

[11] Students of the Faculties of Engineering and Chemistry only.

[13] Enrolled students and graduates in universities and vocational institutions of higher education for 1867-1880 and 1895-1914. Source : László Szögi, Ungarländische Studenten an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen, 1789-1919, Budapest, Eötvös Lóránd Tudományegyetem Levéltára, 2001.

[14] Graduates and students of most institutions of higher education (except schools of creative or performing arts) in Vienna. Source : Gábor Patyi, Magyarországi diákok bécsi egyetemeken és főiskolákon, 1890-1918, /Students from Hungary in Viennese universities and academies, 1890-1918/, Budapest, Eötvös Lóránd Tudományegyetem Levéltára, 2004.

[15] Cf. Magyar statisztikai közlemények /Hungarian statistical reports/, 61, pp. 392-427.

[16] Magyar statisztikai közlemények /Hungarian statistical reports/, 64, p. 85.

[17] Cf. Magyar statisztikai közlemények /Hungarian statistical reports/, 16. p. 518.

[18] The 1900 census found 9741 Roman Catholics in Transylvania, speaking only German, that is, 2,9 % of all Roman Catholics in the region. Cf. Ibid. p. 518 and p. 584.

[19] Source : Gábor Patyi, Magyarországi diákok bécsi egyetemeken és főiskolákon, op.cit.

[20] Together with those whose religious affiliation is not known, representing a mere 3,4 % of the total.

[21] Source : László Szögi, Ungarnländische Studenten an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen …, op. cit.

[22] Mostly creative arts, agriculture and forestry.

[23] Together with those whose religious affiliation is not known, which was unfortunately a very high proportion in Germany – some 61 % of the total -, Prussian universities usually ignoring confessional qualities in their files.

[25] According to the 1899 curriculum of gymnasiums in Hungary, German was taught in the six upper classes in altogether 19 accumulated weekly hours. German was thus the fourth most important subjects in the curriculum, as against 44 hours for Latin, 30 hours for Hungarian, and 26 hours for Maths. Cf. István Mészáros, Középszerű iskoláink kronológiája és topográfiája, 996-1948, /Chronology and topography of our secondary schools, 996-1948/, Budapest, Akadémiai, 1988, 103.

[26] In these secondary schools without Latin, German took the third place among the most important subjects with 24 accumulated weekly hours taught in all the eight classes, as against 31 hours for Maths and 28 hours for Hungarian. Cf. Ibid. loc. cit.