The era of Jewish quotas in med schools

Editor's note: After Medicine at Michigan published the 175th anniversary issue, we heard from alumni who asked us to write about quotas for Jewish students in the early and mid-1900s. We found a complex history and glimpses of an untold story.

The correspondence from University of Michigan Medical School Secretary Arthur C. Curtis, M.D., is a mixture of facts, figures, and more than a few opinions. 

Written in 1934 in response to an inquiry from Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore about the number of Jewish students at the Medical School, Curtis’ letter began with the number of Jewish students who graduated in each of the 10 previous years: from two in 1922 to a high of 28 in 1932, then down slightly to 26 in 1933. He added some data about Jewish interns. 

Then Curtis moved away from the numbers. “My impression of the Jewish student in the Medical School is as follows: He frequently is brilliant. At the present time I do not feel that he represents any standard social type,” Curtis wrote. Jewish students from families in the United States for two or more generations are “usually well bred, well cultured, and distinctly high class people,” he wrote, while those who were born in Europe or whose parents more recently immigrated “are apt to be an entirely different type, sometimes radical, sometimes asocial, often unstable.” 

This was an era of Jewish quotas at many medical schools. Columbia University, Harvard University, Yale University, and other top programs restricted the number of Jews who would be admitted, starting after World War I. Quotas “were a response to the massive wave of Russian Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century and the interest of these immigrants and their children in medical education,” Edward C. Halperin, M.D., the chancellor of New York Medical College, wrote in a widely cited 2001 paper, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920-1955.”

Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell tried to establish a direct quota on Jewish students and argued that allowing a large number of Jewish students on campus would increase antisemitism and discourage more desirable Protestant students from attending the university. His faculty and board rejected his proposal, but Harvard adopted unofficial quotas on Jewish students, Halperin wrote. At Yale Medical School, Dean Milton C. Winternitz instructed his secretary to mark applications with an “H” for Hebrew and a “C” for Catholic. He told the admissions committee, Halperin wrote: “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.” 

At Michigan, quotas were not used, but a personal interview was instituted to “exclude Jews on the basis of their having an unacceptable personality,” Halperin wrote, citing Horace Davenport’s book Not Just Any Medical School (U-M Press, 1999), written about U-M. Beginning in 1927, all applicants with satisfactory credentials had to be interviewed. “In the first year 589 applied, but only 300 presented themselves for interview and examination,” Davenport wrote. “The reduction was particularly noticeable in New York, a major source of Jewish applicants.” 

The Curtis letter provides a franker glimpse of the thinking of many Medical School leaders at that time. He wrote that they were among the top students, but also that “Jewish young men are making a mistake in crowding into the medical field, because at the present time their percentage in it is many times their percentage in the population in the United States, and … they are making competition among themselves very difficult and causing practically every medical school in the country to look askance upon their applications.” He suggested to Rabbi Lazaron that high school students could be “directed” into other fields. 

“What he’s saying is: our most brilliant students are Jewish, and also please tell them to stop applying. What you see in that letter is not unusual for the time,” says Karla Goldman, Ph.D., the Sol Drachler Professor of Social Work, director of the School of Social Work’s Jewish Communal Leadership Program, and a professor of Judaic studies. Goldman is also the co-principal investigator of the U-M Inclusive History Project’s look at the experiences of Jews at U-M. 

Jewish students at the Medical School, like those from campus as a whole, likely experienced “a mixture of normalcy and strong Americanization, along with some edginess of not belonging,” Goldman says. 

“What we know is that there were exclusions. We know that these institutions reflected the prejudices of their time, just as we do now,” says Goldman. A more complete story about the U-M experience could be told, she says, but it would require more records from U-M’s graduate schools becoming available and a focused research effort to sift through a vast amount of archival material to find letters and documentation that wouldn’t turn up in a database search. “The story is not fully written yet.”

Sources: American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio; Halperin, Edward C. “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920-1955.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56, no. 2 (2001): 140-167; Boster, Dea H., and Joel D. Howell. A History of the University of Michigan Medical School at the Bicentennial. University of Michigan Press, 2017; Davenport, Horace W. Not Just Any Medical School: The Science, Practice, and Teaching of Medicine at the University of Michigan, 1850-1941. University of Michigan Press, 1999.