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In 1920, Hungary introduced the first antisemitic law of the 20th century in Europe: the "numerus clausus." This law placed a restrictive quota of Jewish students at universities and led thousands of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to study abroad; it also set into motion a process of de-emancipating Jews, preceding the Third Reich by over a decade.

Hungarian Students in Exile is an empirical study of over a thousand of these emigrant students, following them as they studied in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Fascist Italy, and Weimar Germany. Author Agnes Katalin Kelemen demonstrates how individual and communal agency enabled thousands of lower-middle-class youth to study abroad and thus resist the numerus clausus, as well as how, in addition to the law's blatant antisemitism, it also served as a tool to push Communists and women out of Hungarian academia. As Kelemen follows these exiles through the interwar period and beyond, readers see how they survived or perished in the Shoah and how survivors could finally return to professional careers in postwar Hungary.

An important contribution to the study of Hungarian Jewish history, Hungarian Students in Exile brings into focus the people who were affected by this law both before and after the Shoah.