Żydzi na wyższych uczelniach technicznych w Polsce do 1939 r.

Statistics making it possible to ascertain the ethnic origin of students in tertiary technical schools are highly irregular and imprecise. Such statistics dealt mainly with the religion of the students, which did not always coincide with ethnic origin (nationality). At the Polytechnical School in Lwow, the numbers of students whose religion was described as Judaism was second only to those who were Roman Catholics. Beginning from the mid- 1890s the numbers of the former group of students never fell below 10 per cent, with the numbers peaking in the school year 1904/1905, when they reached 15.1 per cent. Similar ratios could be observed at the Tsar Nicolaus II Warsaw Polytechnical Institute (WIP), where until 1905 students of the Judaic faith accounted for over 15 per cent of all those studyingthere. After the boycott of the Institute by Poles in 1905, the ratio of Jewish students fell to below 11 per cent (this being the result of a sudden increase in the number of students of the Russian Orthodox faith), but in absolute numbers there was an increase from 88 Jewish students in the year 1911 to 127 in the year 1914. In the initial stages of the inter-war period (1921/1922) there were more students of the Judaic faith at the Warsaw Polytechnic (Warsaw Technical University), 15.5 per cent, than at the Lwow Polytechnic (Lwow Technical University), 13.3 per cent. In the second half of the 1920s, these proportions were reversed; there was a fall in the numbers of that category of students to around 10-11 per cent, roughly corresponding to the percentage of the Jewish population in the Polish society at large. This fall in student numbers resulted from increasingly numerous anti-Semitic campaigns launched at institutions of tertiary education in the country, which became especially intensive in the second half of the 1930s. It is interesting to note that technical studies also attracted women of the Judaic faith, e.g. in 1935/1936 they constituted 28.3 per cent of all the women students at the Lwow Polytechnic, and 16.8 per cent at the Warsaw Polytechnic. They were to be found mainly among the students of chemistry and architecture. Between them, the two technical universities educated a total of 1200 engineers of the Judaic faith, including 100 women (another technical university, the Mining Academy (AG) in Cracow could boast of no more than a handful of Jewish students in 1920s, and since 1929/1930 there were no students of the Judaic faith there at all).