page_title: Pál Teleki
section_title: Anti-Jewish actions
hierarchical_section_title: Pál Teleki / Political life / Anti-Jewish actions
context_page_description: Count Pál János Ede Teleki de Szék was a Hungarian politician who served as prime minister of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 to 1921 and from 1939 to 1941. He was also a famous expert in geography, a university professor, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Chief Scout of the Hungarian Scout Association. He descended from a noble family from Alsótelek in Transylvania.
  He is a controversial figure in Hungarian history because as Prime Minister he tried to preserve Hungarian autonomy under difficult political circumstances, but also proposed and enacted far-reaching anti-Jewish laws.
context_section_description: Teleki is considered "one of the most consistently unaccommodating anti-Semitic politicians of the post-Trianon period". His attitude towards Jews parallels the changing demographic and social situation in Hungary before and after World War I. In the Austro-Hungarian empire the generally fiercely patriotic Hungarian Jews were securing the tenuous Hungarian majority in the Hungarian kingdom. Consequently, Teleki stated at the peace conference of 1919 that "the majority of the Hungarian Jews have completely assimilated to the Hungarians [...] from a social point of view, the Hungarian Jews are not Jews any more but Hungarians." After 1920, with a greatly reduced Hungarian territory, Teleki changed his mind about the Hungarian Jews: he regarded the Jews as a "problem of life and death for the Hungarian people".
  After Regent Horthy appointed Teleki Prime Minister on 19 July 1920 he introduced the first anti-Semitic laws introduced in Europe after the First World War, the so-called "Numerus Clausus Act" of 22 September 1920 which allowed Jews to attend universities only in a direct relation to their proportion of the Hungarian population. He and his government resigned less than a year later on 14 April 1921 when the former emperor, Karl IV, attempted to retake Hungary's throne.
  From 1921 until 1938, Teleki was a professor at Budapest University. While there, journalists asked him what he thought about the anti-Jewish violence that had occurred on the university campus. He replied: "This din does not bother me. In any case, the students take examinations that test their knowledge of the sea and this din is aptly suited to that of the sea."
  Due to the feudal nature of pre-War Hungarian society, where both rich and impoverished aristocrats tried to maintain an "aristocratic" life style and a disadvantaged peasant class had no means of learning and social mobility, the Hungarian Jews constituted a disproportionally large part of the Hungarian middle class. In the 1930 census, Jews comprised 5.1% of the population, but among physicians 54.5 percent were Jewish, journalists 31.7%, and lawyers 49.2%. Persons of Jewish faith controlled four of the five major banks, from 19.5 to 33% of the national income, and around 80 percent of the country's industry. Already after the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (21 March – 1 August 1919), whose leaders, concomitantly with their middle class origins, where often of Jewish parentage, and even more after the worldwide depression struck in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which conversely was associated with Jewish wealth and financial power, the country’s Jews were made scapegoats for all of Hungary's economic, political and social plights.
  After a period of considerable economic turbulence and a general political turn to the far right, Teleki became Prime Minister once again on 16 February 1939. Although considered an Anglophile, one of the first things he did in Parliament was to push the Second Anti-Jewish act initiated by his predecessor Béla Imrédy. This was the first law which defined the term "Jew" in explicitly racial terms: "A person belonging to the Jewish denomination is at the same time a member of the Jewish racial community and it is natural that the cessation of membership in the Jewish denomination does not result in any change in that person’s association with the racial community." It forbade Jews to hold any government position, to be editors, publishers, producers or directors. It restated and reinforced the Numerus Clausus act of 1920 and extended its provisions (representation according to proportion of population) to the business world, regulating even the number of Jewish employees (one in five or two in nine maximum, depending on the size). These laws would affect up to 825,000 Jews, who lived in territory reacquired by Hungary in 1941.
  Teleki promulgated Law No. II relating to national defense, on 11 March 1939, and signed it into law on 12 May of the same year. The text of the bill stipulated that all young Jewish men of arms-bearing age to join forced-labor serv
caption: Statue of Pál Teleki in Balatonboglár, Hungary
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