ON A FINE SPRING DAY in early June 1946, four prisoners were escorted on the grounds of the Fort Jilava prison, near suburban Bucharest. Recorded by a movie camera, one of these men was attired in an elegant double-breasted suit, with a white shirt and a dark tie. A double-peaked white handkerchief could be seen emerging from his breast pocket, and in his right hand he carried a dark hat. Following one-by-one into a forest meadow, the other three prisoners also wore civilian suits, but these looked rather crumpled.
The column halted, and each of the four took his place before a wooden post. Documents were read aloud to the prisoners, already sentenced by the People’s Court, and the members of the gendarmerie readied themselves. The prisoner on the extreme right raised high the hat he was carrying, and a rifle volley replied from the firing squad. With a pistol, an officer administered the coup de grace to three of the four—to the man on the right, at least twice. The camera took close-ups.
The war years had been a long season of “Leaders”: Germany’s Führer, Italy’s Duce, Romania’s Conducator, all of these in one way or another allied in the perpetration of the Holocaust. Romania’s leader until August 1944 was Marshal Ion Antonescu, guided, as were many of his countrymen, by a desire to rid Romania of “foreign elements” and “foreign influence.” Proudly tracing the purity of their national ancestral charter back to 101 C.E., when conquering Roman legions garrisoned the territory then known as Dacia, the notion that Jews may well have been among those who entered with these legions summons an ironic note: Ion Antonescu; former Counsel of Ministers vice-president Mihai Antonescu; Gheorghe Alexianu, ex-governor of Transistria; and former Deputy Interior Minister General C. Z. Vasiliu were the only Romanians executed for war crimes following World War II. After the fall of communism a huge cross was erected at their place of execution. It stands today on this government-owned land, and on this monument the convictions about which one reads are Ion Antonescu’s—about the eternity of the motherland.
The roots of anti-Semitism in Romania, as in most of Eastern Europe, stretch deeply into history. Exercising their limited authority under the Ottoman Empire of the Turks, sixteenth-century princes of the Romanian Lands already were decreeing restrictions of one sort or another on the Jews as a non-Christian people with nebulous and often suspect external loyalties. But the Jewish community was typically permitted a great deal of cultural autonomy, and its members were allowed to pursue their livelihoods with a minimum of official interference until the mid-nineteenth century. Only then did the status of the Jews become a significant political question, a matter that gained importance with each passing decade during the second half of that century. Modernization brought a movement toward emancipation and secularization, but each step in the direction of the Jews’ true integration into Romanian society seemed to trigger a reactionary response. These responses constituted part of a counter-movement away from the intellectual and political trends emanating from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the general evolution of Western Europe and America. Collectively they created the milieu that spawned the radical nationalist and xenophobic movements that would one day unite in the fascist parties that came to power in the 1930s, enacting their anti-Semitic programs as law.
Roman-era tombstones confirm that as early as the second century Jews lived on the territory of what is present-day Romania. Some historians have speculated that during the eighth and ninth centuries some of the Khazars (a people of Turkic origins who converted to Judaism) established themselves on the territory of Romania. Around the year 1367, Jews who had been chased from Hungary established themselves in Walachia.
The first anti-Jewish juridical measures were taken in Moldavia and Walachia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ruling Walachia from 1456 to 1462, Vlad Ţepeş, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and the real man behind Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula tale, persecuted Jewish merchants. In Moldavia, Ştefăniţă (1522–1527), Alexander Lăpuşneanu (1552–1561 and 1564–1569), and Petru Şchiopul (1579) promulgated discriminatory measures against Jewish merchants, sometimes later revoking them. Aron Voda (1592–1595) of Moldavia had many of the Turks of that principality killed and almost certainly some Jewish merchants who were Turkish subjects. Mihai Viteazul (1596–1601) also ordered the killing of nineteen Turkish merchants of the Jewish faith. Still, anti-Semitic measures were sporadic, as were measures in which Jews were also intended or collateral victims of Romanian anti-Turkish sentiment; these facts argue against any perception of sustained, ruler-inspired persecution in these territories during the late Middle Ages. The “foreign policy” of the Romanian Lands was based on vassalage to the Ottoman Empire, manifesting itself in particular in the form of a heavy annual tribute to the sultan. Since that empire was rather tolerant toward Jews, indigenous princes generally complied with that policy, requiring only that “Jews from the Principalities adopt organizational structures based on the Ottoman corporatist system,”1 under which the Jews were required to form guilds. The same applies to the vacillating attitude of the reigning princes of the eighteenth century, some of whom promoted discriminatory measures while others protected the Jewish population.
The legislation of the nineteenth century evolved under the banner of ethnic and religious discrimination. The few demonstrations of goodwill toward Jews, and especially the granting of civil rights, ran against the tenacity of widespread indigenous anti-Semitism.
The “Organic Regulation” of 1831, adopted under Russian pressure, became the first “constitution” of Romania. Chapter 3, Section 94 of the document required each Jew to register with local authorities and to specify his occupation so that “those Jews who [cannot] demonstrate their usefulness [could] be expelled from the concerned localities.”2
Although the revolutionaries of 1848 in Moldavia and Walachia had requested the emancipation of the Jews, and in spite of the goodwill expressed toward the Jews by Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza, the nineteenth century brought a new phase in the evolution of anti-Jewish measures. The growing number of such laws and regulations indicated that this attitude was becoming a fundamental purpose of state policy. On May 5, 1851, a commission was established in Iaşi; although its ostensible purpose was to fight against “vagrancy,” its actual purpose was to define and restrict the right of Jews to settle in Moldavia. On July 31, 1859, in Focşani, Interior Minister Mihail Kogălniceanu demanded that the committee charged with drafting laws for Walachia and Moldavia bar foreign Jews from entering these territories (although it did proclaim the gradual emancipation of resident Jews). In messages to the legislative bodies on December 7, 1863, and January 1, 1865, Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza opened the doors for the gradual emancipation of Romanian Jews. But on January 3, 1864, Kogălniceanu publicly contradicted the prince, and in December of the same year Jews were forbidden to practice law. In 1864 legislation gave Jews the right to vote solely in district elections but restricted even this limited franchise only to those who had served or were serving as officers in the army, held a university diploma, or owned an industrial plant.
In 1866 the abdication of Alexandru Ioan Cuza and the beginning of the reign of the Hohenzollern-Siegmaringen family constituted a major setback for those who favored emancipation of the Jews, Prince (later King) Carol I being himself an anti-Semite. As historian Carol Iancu has observed, “Interior Minister Ion Brătianu, a former revolutionary of 1848, inaugurated a systematic anti-Jewish policy in the spring of 1867. . . . Brătianu’s circulars anticipated the mass expulsions of Jews from the countryside, and [even] expulsions from the country as a whole were strictly enforced by local officials.”3 In March 1868 draft legislation was presented to the Chamber of Deputies as part of a plan to eliminate Jews from most forms of economic activity in the villages. The proposed law was not accepted, but some local officials enforced its provisions as if the bill had been passed. In July 1869, after the French government protested the condition of Jews in Romania, Kogălniceanu replied that he refused to consider Jews full Romanians; on December 16, I. Codreanu, a deputy from Bîrlad, spoke in a similar vein before Parliament, denouncing the “behavior” of Romanian Jews and the aid they received from the “Universal Israelite Alliance.” Iancu has summarized the legal situation of the Jews at the outbreak of the 1877 War of Independence:
They did not have the right to reside permanently in the countryside and they could be expelled [from the countryside and even cities] on charges of vagrancy following an administrative order. They could own neither house, nor land, nor vineyards, nor hotels, nor taverns in the countryside; they could not possess land for cultivation; they could not sell tobacco; their right to own houses or buildings in the cities was always challenged; they could not take part in any public adjudication; they could not become professors, lawyers, pharmacists, state-certified doctors, or railroad employees; they were obliged to serve in the military, but were barred from becoming officers.4
At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the nations of Europe recognized the independence of Romania but required the country to consider all citizens, including Jews, equal under the law. Article 44 of the Treaty of Berlin stipulated that religion might not be used to exclude anyone from “the enjoyment of civil and political rights, access to public employment, [elevation to] ranks and honors, or the exercise of specific . . . professions.”5 But on January 17, 1879, Parliament revised Article 7 of the 1866 constitution, which had made it impossible for Jews to become Romanians (unless they converted); now an individual petition and parliamentary vote were required for naturalization, a requirement that remained on the books until 1919.
After 1879 the government’s course vacillated, anti-Semitic in spirit even if punctuated by occasional democratic gestures. Important political figures such as Interior (and sometimes Foreign) Minister Kogălniceanu and Prime Minister Ion Brătianu maintained before Parliament and abroad that Jews were the enemies of Romania. Parliament itself provided the venue for numerous anti-Semitic declarations. The attitudes they reflected helped ensure, for example, that between 1866 and 1904 only 2,000 Jews would be naturalized. Jewish veterans of the 1877 War of Independence received citizenship, but they numbered a mere 888. Between 1879 and 1911, Parliament naturalized only 189 Jews on a case-by-case basis.6 Under Russian pressure, Romania adopted in 1882 a law against “nihilists” and, as the authorities had the power to define these, this made it easier to expel Jews;7 between 1880 and 1894, 859 individuals were deported, including 163 Jews; and from 1894 to 1906, a total of 6,529, including 1,177 Jews.8 During one 1890 parliamentary session deputies debated “the Jewish invasion from Russia”; no distinction was made between those Jews born in Moldavia and Walachia on the one hand and those who were actual immigrants from the tsar’s territories. In 1891 D. A. Sturdza, the future liberal prime minister, demanded that the government not grant entry to Jews expelled from Russia. On March 1 the Council of Ministers, Romania’s chief governmental body, supported Parliament’s request to expel Jewish “invaders.” Later that year the Chamber of Deputies, under the liberal-conservative government of General I. M. Florescu, appointed a committee to consider new laws discriminating against Jews.
Anti-Semitic discrimination eventually barred Jews from jobs in the railroads, the customs service, the state salt and tobacco monopolies, and the stock market. The 1866 constitution permitted only Romanians (including naturalized subjects) to purchase real estate in rural areas, while an 1869 law forbade Jews to collect taxes there. In 1884 itinerant merchants were barred from the villages, a measure affecting many Jews. Several regulations hindered Jews from obtaining licenses to sell alcoholic beverages in rural settings.
The most dramatic form of discrimination in the rural areas was a series of expulsions that dislocated thousands of Jewish families during the last third of the century—more often in Moldavia than in Walachia, and more often after 1885. While both local and central authorities initiated these expulsions, community councils generally did so only at the prompting of the prefectures or the Ministry of Internal Affairs. How enthusiastic the local bodies were we do not know, but the disbanding of one or two—as when the prefect of Bacău disbanded one of its communal councils for refusing to expel several Jews from the village of Valea Seacă—dissuaded others that might have been considering insubordination.
Those expelled were permitted only a day to leave, even if they were elderly or had been born in the locality, as on August 20, 1885, when twenty-five Jewish families were forced from their homes in Brustureasa Bacău District. In 1889, Kogălniceanu, concretizing plans conceived earlier, drafted nine circulars to hasten the departure of Jews from the countryside, under conditions permitting widespread abuse and robbery. More than twelve hundred men, women, and children were forced from the districts of Roman, Vaslui, Tutova, and Covurlui.9 Another campaign in late 1876 affected Jews in the district of Vaslui, driving more than eight hundred from their homes in less than twenty-four hours.10 That spring Jews in Argeş received evacuation orders, though in this case we do not know if the orders were actually carried out. In 1891, thirty-two of the seventy Jewish families in the village of Pueşti (Tutova District) were ordered to leave; this measure was later canceled. In 1897, many Jews living in the districts of Fălciu and Suceava were expelled; in 1899, more than two hundred from Mălini, Dolma, and Broşteni (Suceava District); in 1904 and 1905, others from towns located in the districts of Dorohoi, Botoşani, Neamţ, Bacău, Tutova, and Tecuci; and occasionally still others from more urban settings, as in 1887, when five hundred Moldavian Jews were expelled from Bucharest. During the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, anti-Semitism and poverty also combined to prompt the mass emigration of Jews from Romania. Between 1899 and 1904, fifty thousand Jews left, and by the start of World War I, ninety thousand Romanian Jews had emigrated.11
For those Jews who remained, discrimination in the fields of medicine and health was also significant. Jews might open a pharmacy only if no Romanian was competing for the license (per a regulation of October 25, 1869). Only Romanians could serve as primary-care physicians at the district level (per a regulation of September 11, 1873). The health law of April 3, 1886, amended in 1893, 1896, and 1898, made Romanian citizenship a requirement for all jobs in sanitary services. “Foreign” pharmacy students or pharmacists’ assistants could be hired only if a Romanian student or assistant also was employed. Although the same law made medical care free for poor Romanians, it stipulated that “foreigners can be admitted for treatment in those hospitals [only] for a fee; the number of beds occupied by foreigners can never exceed 10 percent of the total . . . in the hospital in question.”12 Even this minimum service was often ignored: in 1877, a new administrative regulation at the Bacău Hospital excluded Jewish patients; in 1891, the chief physician of Botoşani began refusing consultations to Jewish patients, also barred from that town’s hospital; and on June 25, 1892, the Monitorul Oficial (Official Monitor) announced that Jews would no longer be admitted to hospitals in Moldavia.
The Primary Education Law and the Secondary and Higher Education Law, both passed in 1893 and amended several times over the next decade, made education free only for the “sons of Romanians.” “Foreigners” might enroll, but only to the extent that space was available, and they had to pay tuition. Lyceums and especially universities nurtured powerful centers of anti-Semitic propaganda in the nineteenth century. The universities at Iaşi and Bucharest supplied the cadres for early anti-Semitic organizations and, after World War I, the core of the first fascist organizations.
The anti-Semitic tradition in the Romanian army—which later played such an important role in the killing of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews during World War II—took root in the nineteenth century. In 1868, military service became compulsory for all males in Romania, with the exception of foreigners; since Jews were generally treated as foreigners, this meant that the army might lose a supply of manpower and cannon fodder. An 1876 law on recruitment therefore stipulated that all male residents must serve; in other words, only citizens of other nations might avoid service. Jews thus became subject to the draft despite the fact that they were not citizens but “stateless foreigners,” as the law defined them, or mere “inhabitants of the country.” And this new provision was passed after the Congress of Berlin.
Within the army Jewish soldiers were often mistreated, and persecution drove some to suicide. On December 12, 1891, one soldier killed himself in Bucharest’s gendarmerie; on April 14, 1895, a certain Horovitz from Iaşi did likewise. On November 8, 1896, an unsuccessful suicide attempt followed the torture of M. Solomonovici by Captain V. Sinescu, who was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment as a result of the incident; on March 6, 1898, another Jewish enlisted man was severely beaten during his military service in the “Rosiori” Regiment No. 4.
In November 1913, delegates to the Extraordinary Congress of Romanian Jews considered the problem and appealed to the king, the legislature, and the cabinet to repeal a confidential military order (reproduced in the October 8 edition of the newspaper Seara [The Evening]) mandating discrimination against Jewish soldiers. Company commanders were to monitor the moods among all non-Romanian soldiers, Jews in particular; non-Romanians were to be promoted to officer rank only as an exception, after review by superior authority, and never in the case of Jews. In order to avoid open discontent, officers were asked to keep the contents of the instruction secret.13
This was the state of affairs as the Balkans sank into an era of violence that began nearly two years before World War I engulfed the West. In Romania some thirteen thousand Jews were mobilized in 1913 to fight in the Second Balkan War; but, despite valiant efforts on their behalf by such prominent intellectuals and political leaders as Ovid Densuşianu, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, C. C. Arion, Lascăr Antoniu, and Leon Ghica-Dumbrăveni, even those who served were refused citizenship. At the height of World War I, Romanian security measures further encouraged discrimination when the 1915 Law for Monitoring Foreigners brought the deportation of hundreds of Jewish families from border areas of Moldavia to district capitals, where they could be kept under closer watch.14 Yet 23,000 Jews served in the Romanian forces, sacrificing 882 dead and 735 wounded; 825 earned decorations for valor. All the while, anti-Semitism continued to thrive in the armed forces.
This state of affairs found reflection in Liviu Rebreanu’s short story “Iţic Ştrul, Deserter,” which depicted the tragedy of a Jewish soldier harassed by an officer who forced him to choose between desertion and suicide. The hero chose to kill himself. Reality was sometimes more tragic than fiction. The Supreme General Staff unleashed an anti-Semitic campaign leading to the execution of a number of Jewish soldiers accused of spying, as on November 22, 1917, in Company 6 of the Eighth Mountain Regiment, where six Jews were shot (one miraculously survived) by their erstwhile comrades on orders of their commanding officer.15 A lunatic wave of denunciation of the Jews—soldiers and civilians alike—followed the banning of communication in the Yiddish language in September 1916. One study noted that “entire families were taken to police stations” and that “anywhere from eleven to twelve thousand Jews were arrested in Moldavia, nine thousand of them during January 1917 in the districts of Iaşi, Botoşani, Dorohoi, Bacău and Fălticeni.” While most of these “suspects” went free after a brief detention, their jailors robbed, flogged, or otherwise abused many of the rest.16
The end of World War I brought temporary refuge from this kind of persecution, especially because the settlement dictated by the Western powers reflected—at least superficially—the intent to foster democratic government throughout the Continent. Although some were encouraged by these measures, those Jews who, exasperated by the abiding anti-Semitism of government and masses alike, had abandoned Romania for the West or for Palestine would be the happy ones. Nearly 100,000 of them, more than one-third of the community, left between 1899 and 1914. Those who later would read in the reforms of 1918 and 1919 the prospect of a genuine and lasting liberalization were doomed to disappointment and tribulation.
On December 29, 1918, Romania abolished the humiliating requirement of parliamentary confirmation for a Jew to become a citizen: proof of birth in the country, and that the individual was not a citizen of another, would henceforth suffice. Even these requirements were waived for those who had fought for the country since 1913;17 only persons sentenced for treason, desertion, or spying were ineligible. Still, though the law of December 1918 represented an important step toward emancipation, it contained a de jure form of discrimination, ostensibly against “minorities” outside Walachia and Moldavia. By that date Romania had absorbed Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina, where considerable populations of Magyars, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews resided. Romania’s rulers were happy to own these territories, less so about the minorities they contained. A law of May 22, 1919, supplemented the earlier law by reaffirming that Jews from Moldavia and Walachia were entitled to Romanian citizenship (and even simplifying the procedure) but spelling out the corollary that those from Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina were not.
Under the St. Germain treaty signed on December 9, 1919, by the Allied powers and Romania, the country agreed to safeguard minorities in its territory, acknowledging that “all Romanian citizens are equal before the law and enjoy the same civil and political rights no matter what their language, race, or religion.”18 In Article 7 of the treaty Romania pledged “to recognize as full citizens and with no formalities the Jews located on all territories of Romania who could not obtain any other citizenship.”19 The new constitution of March 1923 granted Jews and other minorities full citizenship; Article 56 of the Citizenship Law of 1924 extended Romanian citizenship to all inhabitants of Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, Banat, Crişana, Maramureş, and Satu Mare who had been born there of resident parents.
In a sense the period between 1923 and 1938 represented a golden age of human rights in Romania. But storm clouds began to gather in the mid-1930s, with movements led by such groups as the Christian National Defense League, the Iron Guard, and other political parties that raised “the Jewish question,” brandished anti-Semitic slogans, and agitated for a revision of the status of the non-Christian minority. The legal underpinnings of tolerance would not long survive the arrival in power of the radical anti-Semitic right—represented by the minority Goga-Cuza cabinet of the National Christian party—in December 1937.
The cultural history of modern Romanian Jewry cannot be separated from the history of the various Romanian provinces. When Moldavia (without its northern half, Bessarabia, which was lost to Russia in 1812) and Walachia united in 1859 to create Romania, there were already sizable differences between Jews from the two provinces. Moldavian Jews were the majority and were almost all of Ashkenazi origins. They also belonged to Jewish communities, which had emigrated from Poland and Russia and lately established themselves in Moldavia. The Jews in Walachia had established themselves in the south of the country in earlier times and were of Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins. Most of the Jews from Walachia lived in Bucharest, which was by far the most Westernized city in Romania. In 1899, Regat had a population of 266,652 Jews, representing 4.5 percent of the total population. Of this total, 72.4 percent lived in Moldavia, where they made up 10.5 percent of the population of the province.20 During the same year Walachia had a population of 60,760 Jews, of which 43,724 lived in Bucharest. One can thus assume that the Jews from Walachia were more assimilated and Western oriented than the Jews from Moldavia. Ezra Mendelsohn reminds us, however, that this assumption nonetheless requires a certain caution, especially concerning the history of Romanian Jewry in the nineteenth century, for “Reform Judaism of the German or Hungarian type never took root in Walachia; nor was the acculturation of Walachian Jewry accompanied by the adoption of a Romanian national identity.”21
Both of these Jewish communities suffered the consequences of Romanian anti-Semitism:
Prewar Romania had a well-deserved reputation of being, along with Russia, the most anti-Semitic country in Europe. Despite pressure, at times quite intense, from the great powers of Europe, Romania had steadfastly refused to emancipate her Jewish subjects. As a result, by the eve of World War I, very few Romanian Jews had acquired citizenship; the great majority were considered foreigners and therefore of inferior legal status. It is instructive to compare this situation with that of Hungary. Unlike the Magyars, the Romanians had no need of Jewish services in ethnically mixed regions, since the Regat was a homogeneous Romanian nation-state.22
After the end of World War I, the demographic composition of Greater Romania, which reacquired Bessarabia from Russia, and Transylvania and Bukovina from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, changed dramatically. From an ethnically largely homogeneous entity, Romania now found that 30 percent of its inhabitants were ethnic minorities, of whom the Jews represented an important fraction. According to the 1930 census, Bessarabia had 207,000 Jews, or 7.2 percent of its population; Transylvania had 193,000 Jews, or 3.5 percent of its population; and Bukovina had 93,000 Jews, or 10.9 percent of its population.
The history of the Jewish communities in these newly acquired territories was quite different from the history of the Jews in Walachia and Moldavia. In Bessarabia the very large Jewish community had suffered severe discrimination under the Russian tsars. The infamous pogrom of 1903 is one well-known historical remainder of many years of savage anti-Semitic agitation. The Jews in Bessarabia were largely Yiddish speaking and belonged to the lower-middle class and to the proletariat. The Jewish intelligentsia in Bessarabia was Russified and looked, as Ezra Mendelsohn wrote, toward Odessa and not Vienna. But in general the Jews of Bessarabia felt no regret at leaving behind the tsarist empire or the chaos of the Russian civil war.23 According to Mendelsohn,
The same cannot be said about the Jews from Transylvania, who up until World War I, lived in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As in Slovakia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian realm, the Jews were regarded as useful allies in the heroic struggle for Magyarization, and in Transylvania as elsewhere they were content to play the role of loyal Magyars. . . . In the north the Jewish community was much more like that of Subcarpathian Rus—very populous, very prominent in the few cities that existed in this backward area, mostly Yiddish speaking, and very strongly Hasidic (the most famous center of Hasidism being in Szatmár-Németi or Satu Mare, the home of the famous Satmar dynasty).24
In Bukovina, which had been part of the Habsburg Empire, the situation of the Jews was again very different. Outside Cernăuţi, then the capital city, some Jews retained Hasidic and Orthodox traditions, but on the whole the Jews were Germanized and not viewed with hostility by the rest of the population. Emancipated and Westernized, the Jews from Cernăuţi were not unlike a sizable fraction of the acculturated Jewry from Bucharest.
The Jewish political scene in Romania was extremely complex due to the existence of diverse communities such as those from Regat, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania. “The leading political organization of Regat Jewry,” reports Mendelsohn, “was the Union of Romanian Jews (Uniunea Evreilor Romani, known as the UER) the interwar version of the prewar Organization of Native Born Jews (Uniunea Evreilor Pămînteni) founded in 1910. The Organization of Native Born Jews was chiefly a society of [the] Bucharest bourgeoisie and [the] professional class, which favored the Romanization of Romanian Jewry and which fought for Jewish legal equality.”25 Despite the fact that the UER appeared at first glance as an “assimilationist” organization, fighting for Jewish emancipation and against anti-Semitism, the UER was in fact a pro-Zionist association. The group’s most prominent leader was Wilhelm Filderman, an important lawyer from Bucharest.
In the newly acquired territories Jewish nationalism ran stronger than in Regat. For example, the Folkist movement, which proclaimed Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish people, was strong in Bukovina. The Jewish socialist organization Bund was rather strong in Bessarabia, where moderate Orthodox Jews and Zionists also had a strong presence. In Transylvania radical Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews coexisted with a majority of the Neolog (Reform) Hungarian-oriented Jewry. Transylvanian Jewry had its Zionist movements as well.
Immediately after the end of World War I, the strategy of the Jewish politicians in Romania was to ally themselves with the major Romanian political parties that were disposed to show some willingness to fight anti-Semitism. The UER first supported the National Liberal party, then the People’s party, and then the National Peasant party. This political strategy was contested by the Zionists, who in 1928, through four members of the Romanian Parliament (two from Transylvania, one from Bukovina, and one from Bessarabia), created a Jewish national club soon to become a Jewish national party (in 1931). That year the Jewish party received almost 65,000 votes, which sent four deputies to Parliament. Two years later the new party’s vote declined by half, which failed to send a single representative to Parliament. On the brink of World War II, Filderman remained the undisputed leader of the Romanian Jewish community. Modern, aggressive, and courageous, he would play a major role in the battle to save the Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust.
But no matter how diverse the Romanian Jews were, no matter how their strategies for survival differed, one common danger confronted them all: anti-Semitism. Widespread, violent, and common, anti-Semitism was by far the largest threat to Romanian Jews.
Common as anti-Semitism was in many Romanian political parties, only two of them used violence when dealing with the Jewish problem. The first was the aforementioned Christian National Defense League (Liga Apararii National Crestine [LANC]) created in 1923 by Professor Alexandru C. Cuza, which advocated a strictly enforced numerus nullus (no Jewish representation, participation, or membership) and the revocation of the citizenship of Jews. LANC, which can be described as a “constitutional” fascist party, used the swastika as a political symbol long before Hitler did. More radical in the ways in which it proposed the solving of the Jewish problem was the second party, a splinter of LANC, the Iron Guard, first known as the League of the Archangel Michael, led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Members of both LANC and the Iron Guard were involved in many anti-Semitic incidents in the 1920s. These incidents—destruction of synagogues, burning of Jewish homes, beatings of Jews—were unfortunately only a prelude to the suffering Romanian Jewry would undergo during World War II.
Anti-Semitic politicians fueled the rising hate against the Jews. For example, on July 14, 1926, A. C. Cuza declared: “It is monstrous that the constitution should speak of the rights of the Jews. The solution ought to be to eliminate the Jews by law. The first step ought to be to exclude them from the army. Leases of forests granted to Jews should be canceled. All land held by Jews should be expropriated. Likewise, all town houses owned by Jews should be confiscated. I would introduce a numerus clausus (proportional Jewish representation, participation, and membership) in the schools.”26 Attacks against the Jews were not only verbal. Anti-Semitic students staged numerous violent demonstrations during which many Jews were severely beaten and Jewish houses and shops were vandalized and devastated. Personal attacks were frequent as well, as on August 9, 1926, when a number of Jews were attacked at the railway station in Adjud; after being severely beaten, the victims were thrown off the train.27 Sometimes the incidents had more tragic results. On November 10, 1926, a trial for Cernăuţi Jewish students charged with organizing a demonstration against certain anti-Semitic university professors opened “in an extremely stormy atmosphere. . . . When the Court rose and the public had filed out, a young man drew a revolver and shot one of the accused students, the young David Falik, in the abdomen. He fell in a pool of blood. The criminal was immediately arrested. Interrogated as to the motive for his crime, he stated that his name was Nicolae Totu, that he was a pupil of the Iaşi lycée, and that he had come specially to Cernăuţi in order to commit his crime.”28 Shot three times, Falik died after forty-eight hours. Student associations in the city immediately organized rallies during which they expressed solidarity with the criminal.
Totu’s trial opened in Cîmpulung on February 21, 1927. His lawyer, Paul Iliescu, a member of the Romanian Parliament, said: “David Falik has been killed by the bullet of Totu and so will die all the country’s enemies, by innumerable bullets which will be fired against the filthy beasts. Gentlemen of the jury, the icon of this boy should hang in your homes. You should pray that God may give health and long life to this martyred child who is an honor to our nation. Totu is a martyr and a hero.”29 Cuza also spoke in the defense of the accused, calling him “our dear child Totu.”30 The verdict was not guilty. “Adorned with ribbons of the national colors, Totu was carried in procession around the town on the shoulders of his friends.”31 The following day Octavian Goga, then the Romanian minister of the interior, declared that Totu was a national hero.32 Nicolae Totu would eventually become one of the leaders of the Iron Guard. LANC merged with Goga’s National Agrarian party, creating the National Christian party. At the very end of 1937, Goga ascended to the position of prime minister in an administration that became known in Romanian history as the Goga-Cuza government. This government would enact heavy anti-Semitic legislation. Numerus clausus was to become a fact, and approximately 200,000 Jews would be stripped of their citizenship.
On January 21, 1938, King Carol II and Goga, also president of the Council of Ministers, signed a decree mandating the “review” of the citizenship of Romanian Jews. Minister of Justice Rădulescu-Mehedinţi cited as the government’s motivation the “Jewish invasion” after the unification of the principalities in 1859.33 In interviews granted to A. L. Easterman of the British Daily Herald, Carol and Goga claimed that 250,000 or even 500,000 Jews were “illegals.” But if Carol II denied any plan to expel them, Goga spoke of them as “500,000 vagrants” not to be considered Romanian citizens.34 In an interview with Paris Soir on January 10, Goga already had elaborated on his ideas:
At the end of the last century, the Treaty of Berlin forced us to grant . . . citizenship rights to the Jews. Fortunately, . . . it did not state that they had to be naturalized immediately, and so we could view them as foreigners. Furthermore, at that point there were not that many in Moldavia and Walachia, which made up our country then. For the most part these descended from Jews chased from Spain in the fifteenth century . . . ; these Jews of the pure Semitic type, with olive skin, black eyes, black hair, fairly fine features, and reasonably good looks, have nothing in common with those we call here the “barbaric Jews,” with their reddish skin, slanted eyes, and flattened faces, who came later from Poland and Russia. We could accommodate the former if needed. . . . [But] I estimate that about 500,000 Jews [of the latter type] have immigrated here since 1914.35
Goga proposed to deport those half million Jews to Madagascar, and he was seconded by his colleague Istrate Micescu, minister of foreign affairs in the Goga-Cuza government, who opined, “it is urgent that we sweep up our courtyard because it serves no purpose to tolerate this garbage.”36
In spite of Goga’s racist comments, Carol II and Goga’s Decree No. 169 did not establish legal discrimination based solely on racial criteria: geography, other conditions of birth, and the obligation to possess specific legal documents were also determinants. But if the decree was not strictly racist, it was nonetheless fascist in intent; it embodied the government’s own anti-Semitic values, and it was calculated to steal the ground out from under the feet of its political competitor on the right, Codreanu’s Iron Guard, by demonstrating before the public that the Goga-Cuza administration too could be counted upon to “restrict” the Jews.37 To cite another example of the politics of the time, the constitutional law adopted on February 27, 1938, defined membership in the Romanian nation by blood, legally distinguishing between Romanians “by race” and Romanians “by residence.”38 The government certainly did not overrule Gheorghe Alexianu, royal resident of the territory of Suceava (and three years later governor of Transnistria), when on December 1, 1938, he forbade the Jewish population to speak Yiddish in public places.39 In the spring of 1940, Carol tried to co-opt the other radical anti-Semites by bringing the Legionnaires (many of whom were now members of the Iron Guard) into his government of royal dictatorship, and during the summer that government adopted a markedly fascist direction. But try as Carol did throughout the entire period from January 1938 (when he dissolved the Goga-Cuza government and installed his own dictatorship) to September 1940 (when he was forced from power by an alliance of the Legionnaires and Ion Antonescu), he failed to beat the Legionnaires at their own game.
Definition of the “Jew”
On August 8, 1940, Carol II approved Law No. 2650, which defined who was to be considered a Jew and delimited three categories of them; it also specified the degree of legal discrimination to which each was to be subjected. The executive decree was signed by Prime Minister Ion Gigurtu and Minister of Justice Ion V. Gruia. A corollary law forbade marriages between Romanians “by blood” and Jews. Though antedating the actual fascist government, these laws constituted additional confirmation of the fascist tendencies that characterized the late royal dictatorship. Because such laws referred to “Romanian blood,” the “biological conception of the nation,” and “the racial laws of Nuremberg,” a brief digression into a short summary of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic definition of the Jew is necessary.
The November 1935 citizenship law of the Third Reich divided the German people into Aryans and non-Aryans, many of the latter further subdivided into: (a) “second-degree Mischlinge” (literally, “mixed-bloods,” or persons with one Jewish grandparent); (b) “first-degree Mischlinge” (persons with two Jewish grandparents but not married to a Jew as of September 15, 1935, and not professing the Judaic religion); and (c) Jews (persons with two Jewish grandparents and professing the Judaic religion or married to a Jew as of 1935, or persons with three or four Jewish grandparents). It was only persons defined as Jews who were eventually subjected to extermination. In general, Mischlinge could neither be civil servants nor serve in the army; they were not permitted to marry Aryan Germans without official consent. With respect to the Mischlinge, two contrary attitudes prevailed among the Nazi officialdom, one tending toward their integration into German society, the other, never fully implemented, seeking their elimination.40 It is important to note that even in racial Germany, in certain cases the sole criterion for categorizing individuals as either Aryan or non-Aryan was religion.41
From mid-1940 to early 1942, a large number of laws and regulations with strong anti-Semitic intent issued from the Romanian government.42 Specifically, the law of August 8, 1940, defined the following as Jews:
a. persons professing the “Mosaic” faith;
b. persons born to parents practicing the Mosaic faith;
c. persons converted to Christianity, though born to unconverted Jewish parents;
d. Christians born to a Christian mother and a Jewish father who had not been baptized;
e. persons born illegitimately to a Jewish mother;
f. women included in the above subsections, even though married to Christians, if they embraced Christianity less than one year from the establishment of the “Party of the Nation” (June 22, 1939); and
g. Jews “by blood” even if atheists.43
The definition of “Jew” in this law was stricter even than in Germany, as demonstrated by items d and e above. Under the Nazis, Christians born to a Christian and a Jewish parent were labeled as second-degree Mischlinge, those to a Jewish mother outside of wedlock as first-degree Mischlinge.
The Romanian law further categorized Jews as follows: (a) a broad group consisting of those who had settled in Romania after December 30, 1918; (b) a much smaller group consisting of those naturalized before 1918, including those who had served in Romania’s wars, the descendants of those individuals, and those naturalized pursuant to the absorption of Dobruja in 1913; and finally (c) all others. Jews in all three categories were barred from adopting Romanian names; none might buy rural property; and any who educated their Christian children in a spirit contrary to “religious or national principles” risked revocation of parental authority. If, on the date of the decree, Jews belonging to the second category were not yet government employees, they could neither enter state employment nor take up military service; those in the first and third categories could in no case work as civil servants, attorneys, merchants in rural districts, purveyors of alcoholic beverages, soldiers, editors, members of national sports associations, or housekeeping personnel in public institutions. The decree stipulated imprisonment of anywhere from one month to two years for violators.
The same decree gave obvious preference to Jews or their descendants who had been naturalized as participants in the 1877 War of Independence and to those naturalized individually by parliamentary vote. The number of such persons was small, no more than two thousand. Combatants in the Second Balkan War and World War I (decorated or not) also received preference. This law constituted a return to nineteenth-century anti-Semitic dicta that put into doubt the citizenship of most Romanian Jews. As the minister of justice acknowledged, this classification constituted a transitional step to a future system.44 Indeed, twenty-seven days after the passage of the decree, Romania transformed itself into a “National Legionnaire State.”
The law prohibiting marriages between Jews and gentiles—the preamble of the document directly citing the 1935 Nuremberg Laws—emphasized that people of pure Romanian blood were “the main element making up the foundation of the country.”45 Later the government provided for waivers to state officials wishing to marry non-Romanians, but not if the latter were Jews. Another law extended the same privilege to commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Despite numerous references to “biological criteria” in defining the nation, Romanian law continued to define Jewishness on the religious basis set out in the August 8, 1940, decree. However, these criteria evolved further under the successor Antonescu governments.
Under Antonescu (then prime minister), the statutory decree of October 5, 1940, defined Jews as “all those both of whose parents, or only one of them, [were Jewish], regardless of whether they or their parents were baptized, . . . whether they are Romanian citizens, or whether they have their residence within the territory of our country.”46 This definition found subsequent confirmation in numerous anti-Semitic laws, including the October 14, 1940, decree concerning access to education; that document classified as Jews those born of two Jewish parents or a Jewish father, without consideration of the confession of that father, and those born to a Jewish mother outside of marriage.47 That year and the next, other laws dealing with the medical and military professions reflected similar definitions.48
The system of law gave expression to the religious criteria upon which fascist legislation was inconsistently based, swerving to the racial definition and back again. A December 17, 1941, decree mandating a census of those “with Jewish blood” required registration at the Central Jewish Office (Centrala Evreilor) for all persons having one or two Jewish parents or two Jewish grandparents. Yet in this case Jewish parents or grandparents meant all those who professed or had ever professed the Mosaic religion. Individuals having a single Jewish grandparent did not need to register with the Central Jewish Office, but they nonetheless had to make a declaration to the police,49 a requirement that was dropped in 1942.50 The same ambivalence is revealed in the fact that a Jew born to Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity and who had himself been baptized was nevertheless considered Jewish for tax purposes—but Christian regarding his military obligation!
The 1940 anti-Semitic laws of the Gigurtu government under Carol II thus formed the precedent for lawmakers in the subsequent fascist regimes (of Antonescu-Sima and Antonescu). And unlike the situation in Germany, conversion to Christianity continued to be considered valid by the Romanian fascists, as long as it had taken place prior to August 9, 1940. Despite the hostility between Antonescu and Carol II, an undeniable continuity characterized the two governments’ anti-Jewish legislation.
Hitler freed some Mischlinge from their inferior standing; in 1943, Antonescu likewise legally emancipated a number of fully ethnic but “integrated” or “meritorious” Jews from their inferior status.51 Such exceptions, however, could have no effect on the great mass of the Jewish population, whose lives were inescapably circumscribed by anti-Semitic legislation. Still, as we shall see below, it was often not the law per se, but geographical and other factors, that determined life or death.
Economic Legislation
In an interview granted on September 28, 1940, to the Italian newspaper La Stampa (The Press), Ion Antonescu laid out the underlying conception that would guide Romania’s anti-Jewish economic legislation. Jews formed the greatest obstacle to expansion of the Romanian economy, Antonescu averred, promising to solve the problem by “replacing Jews with Romanians—in the first place Legionnaires—who will ready themselves during the interim. Most Jewish property will be expropriated in exchange for compensation. Jews who arrived in Romania after 1913—that is, after the second phase of the Balkan Wars—will be removed as soon as possible, even if they have become Romanian citizens, while the rest . . . will be gradually replaced.”52
Because the alliance between Antonescu and the Iron Guard lasted only a few months, this “economic program” was carried out both with and without Legionnaire cooperation. The process of expropriation was termed “Romanization” (similar to Aryanization) by the corporatist economist Mihail Manoilescu, who categorized all enterprises as one of three types: (1) foreign-owned (financed abroad, profits repatriated); (2) belonging to Romanian Jewish capitalists who transferred neither profits nor interest abroad but whose enterprise benefited non-Romanians; and (3) owned by Romanian capitalists, in which case all profit remained part of Romania’s wealth.53 Since the first two cases could be equated, the term “Romanization” came to mean that enterprises based both on foreign capital and on Jewish capital would be transferred to “Romanian” ownership. In Manoilescu’s words, “we will make no distinction between foreigners and domestic Jews.”54 At the same time, this “theoretical” approach distinguished between “Jewish” and “Romanian” capital strictly on the basis of ethnic criteria.
In further detailing the conception of Romanization, Manoilescu explained:
We do not include among the nonnative forces to be eliminated the German people of Romania. The German national community has a character of its own that cannot be compared to the other ethnic groups in our country. In this part of the world, this community enjoys historical rights comparable to our own and personifies a civilization and culture comparable to those of the German Reich.55
In fact, Romanization was the economic expression of state anti-Semitism. The intent was to establish a “Romanian national bourgeoisie” and to cleanse the economy by removing non-native elements, the Jews above all.
During the first stage of Romanization, from September 1940 to January 1941, this “economic” initiative proceeded chaotically, often taking the form of simple plundering. Legionnaires forced many Jews to sell their businesses for modest sums or simply took them over without any compensation at all. On occasion, to circumvent this process, some Jewish property owners sold to ethnic Germans (who, by agreement with the Third Reich, enjoyed specified extraterritorial rights), thereby causing an increase of German capital in Romania. Ultimately, the Legionnaire expropriations caused severe economic disruption and elicited the discontent of Antonescu, who, for all his anti-Semitism, believed in adherence to the law.
On October 5, 1940, Law No. 3347 nationalized Jewish rural property, with Article 2 specifying a very broad definition of a “Jew,” held to be a person either of whose parents was Jewish, regardless of whether they were practicing, whether they were citizens or not, or whether they were residents on Romanian soil. No exceptions in the enforcement of this law were to be permitted. A supplementary decree of November 17 ordered nationalization of forests, mills, distilleries, lumberyards, and granaries, as well as nonarable land. In combination with expulsions and deportations, these decrees completed the Romanization of rural areas. On December 4, Jewish-owned boats and barges were confiscated too.
Decree No. 842, published on March 18, 1941 (after the Iron Guard had been removed from power), dealt with “the transfer of Jewish buildings to state-owned assets.” The term “Jew” was defined in accordance with the same Article 2 of the October 5, 1940, law, but here it exempted:
a. Jews naturalized on an individual basis before August 15, 1916;
b. Jews who had fought in the Romanian army and had been wounded or decorated;
c. descendants of Jews who had died fighting for Romania;
d. Jews who had converted to Christianity at least twenty years earlier, if they had married Romanians;
e. other Jews who had converted at least thirty years earlier; and
f. descendants of those included in the preceding exemptions.
In the cities a purge of Jewish civil servants had begun even before the inauguration of the “National Legionnaire” government in September 1940. From August 6 to September 3, nine ministries in Bucharest dismissed a total of 609 Jewish employees. On September 13, immediately after the fascist consolidation of power, the Iron Guard established “commissars of Romanization” with great power over the manufacturing sector; often corrupt, more often inept, these figures caused significant damage to the economy in only a few months. As a result, on January 18, 1941, they were removed by order of Antonescu. And on November 16, 1940, Law No. 825 ordered all enterprises of any nature whatsoever to fire salaried (i.e., white-collar or professional) Jews, excepting only certain veterans and their descendants, and providing for only two weeks to three months of severance pay, depending on seniority. Under this law, only the Council of Ministers retained the right to grant dispensations to certain public works where skilled Jews were essential.56
Further decrees restricted surviving Jewish business activities in late 1940 and early 1941. The government prohibited Jews from engaging in the sale of products included in the state monopoly—for example, salt, matches, tobacco—while the Ministry of Labor required Jewish-owned grocery stores to remain closed on Sundays so they might not take away business that otherwise would go to Romanian shops the other six days of the week.57 And on March 25, 1941, Jewish stockholders in Romanian companies were required to register their names on all bearer bonds.
The administration and resale of expropriated Jewish property presented particular problems that had to be addressed by law. Statutory decrees of May 3, 1941, and March 6, 1942, crafted a National Center for Romanization, placing at its head a deputy minister for Romanization, colonization, and inventory. On August 23, 1941, the National Bank of Romania was authorized to grant special credits for the acquisition of commercial and industrial property from Jews; to ease its operations, risks it assumed were insured through the Ministry of Finance. On March 14, 1942, a decree specified punishments for those attempting to conceal Jewish property through fictitious sales.
While expropriations could be carried out with some degree of efficiency, the same was not true of the replacement of Jews in the workforce. Although most Jews were fired in 1943, thousands continued to work for Romanian firms, which were forced to seek every possible sort of waiver and approval because the Jews’ skills remained irreplaceable;58 even a “Romanized” economy could not do without their services.
Forced Labor
Another key component of the fascists’ anti-Semitic legislation was Jewish forced labor. As early as December 5, 1940, the government decreed that Jews were obligated to work in the public interest under the Ministry of National Defense or for other state ministries (such as the Labor Ministry) and institutions in cooperation with the Defense Ministry. Organization of Jewish labor was assigned to the so-called recruitment circles.59 During their employment Jews fell under military supervision and law.60 The youngest (eighteen to twenty) and oldest (forty-one to fifty-one) of those imprisoned enjoyed the privilege of working in their cities of residence; those aged in between could be assigned to the so-called external detachments. Severe sanctions threatened anyone who tried to evade these coercive measures, as evidenced by this sampling of instructions from a Supreme General Staff order of June 27, 1942, specifying punishments for the following violations:
f. For minor infractions (delay in answering roll call, indiscipline): corporal punishment.
g. Deportation to Transnistria, fatigue duty, or transfer to ghettos with family awaited those who: repeated infractions mentioned under point f; worked carelessly, evaded work through fraud or bribery, were absent at roll calls, or suspended work without permission; failed to advise the recruitment circle of changes in residence; or cultivated close relations with Romanians.61
Ultimately, exploitation of Jewish forced labor fell to the Supreme General Staff of the army, pursuant to Antonescu’s Order No. 5295. The army had the right to use women between the ages of eighteen and forty as laundresses, seamstresses, and even office workers. Though only adults were obligated under the law, minors were widely employed. Indeed, a message sent by the General Staff to the Central Office of Romanian Jews on January 10, 1943, stated that students were obligated to perform labor from the age of sixteen.62 Such youths were used to remove snow, perform agricultural labor, or dig out victims of Allied bombings.
The forced laborers’ housing typically was unsanitary, often in railroad cars, shacks, and barns. They endured hunger and cold, and lacked proper clothing and medical attention. On the order of Antonescu, on July 8, 1941, General Ion “Jack” Popescu, deputy minister of the interior, ruled that all Jews in the internment camps would have to perform “hard labor.” In cases of flight, one out of every ten remaining prisoners would be shot. Those not meeting expectations would suffer deprivation of rations and be barred from receiving food packages.63 Only toward the end of the war were these draconian regulations sometimes ameliorated as, increasingly convinced of the likelihood of Allied victory, the slave masters grew more willing to countenance evasion—when the appropriate “special taxes” or bribes were forthcoming.
Military Status of the Jews
The military status of Romanian Jews under fascists translated, as we have seen, into the organization of Jewish forced labor under military jurisdiction and the levying of additional taxes. The December 5, 1940, decree that forced Jews to labor “in the civic interest” in accordance with the needs of the state also abolished the military obligation of Jewish males.64 Those Jews physically incapable of labor service were required to pay a military tax. The modest number of Jewish officers and noncoms still on active duty at the time of the decree were retired, but they were allowed to receive benefits only if they had served at least ten years.
On January 20, 1941, yet another decree increased the military taxes. Even Jews mobilized for labor in various enterprises now were obligated to pay; only those on forced labor projects and retired officers were exempted. Physicians, pharmacists, engineers, and architects conscripted by the armed forces enjoyed better conditions—for a while.
The Health-Care Professions
On November 15, 1940, “Jewish” doctors and other health-care providers, regardless of what religion they practiced or the nationality of their spouses, were excluded from the National Association of Physicians. Jewish physicians were segregated in their own professional associations, based on their specializations, and permitted to care only for Jewish patients. But to join even these associations a doctor was required to have been a citizen living in Romania prior to June 1, 1919. Each such individual was obliged to wear a badge identifying him as a Jewish physician.
The Society of Jewish Physicians fell under the authority of the National Association of Physicians. In addition to limiting Jews’ medical practice, their role in medical science was also restricted: Jews were henceforth forbidden to join medical-scientific societies, and they were even barred from publishing in scientific journals. The peculiar wording of the law, openly anti-Semitic and yet peculiarly nonexplicit, would baffle no one: “To be enrolled in the College of Physicians [a doctor] must be of Romanian, Aryan, Magyar, or Turkish ethnicity and [practice either] the Christian or Muslim religion.”65 The practice of medicine was now declared incompatible even with marriage to a Jewish man or woman (although Romanian physicians married to Jewish women before publication of the law were not penalized). Members of the College of Physicians were, as a rule, allowed to provide care “only to Christian Romanian or Aryan ethnic patients and to Turkish patients”; Jewish patients could receive attention only in emergencies.66
On October 3, 1940, a new law prohibited the granting of pharmacy licenses to Jews and forbade them from opening drug warehouses or medicinal products laboratories. Clearly these regulations brought disarray to the practice of medicine in Romania, but the great irony is that fascist medical legislation claimed the goals of preserving and improving the health of the ethnic Romanian population.
Education
On August 29, 1940, near the end of the reign of Carol II, the Ministry of National Education, Religion, and the Arts regulated the place of Jews in elementary, secondary, and higher education. Even in Jewish schools, the Romanian language had to be taught, and history and geography had henceforth to be taught by Romanian schoolteachers specially appointed by the ministry. A numerus clausus strictly limited Jewish students to no more than 6 percent of any single gymnasium class. Jewish students whose parents belonged to the “second category” (i.e., those naturalized before 1918, descendants of Jews naturalized before 1918, and war veterans) were to enjoy preference over other Jews in admissions. Jewish students might be admitted into Romanian classrooms only to fill vacant seats, and they had to pay special taxes. The presence of Jews was likewise limited to 6 percent in higher, professional, and technical education.
Scarcely had these restrictions been adopted when a new decree of October 11, 1940, changed the numerus clausus in higher education to a numerus nullus: Jews could no longer be teachers or serve as administrators in either state-run or private schools serving the Romanian or other Christian communities, nor could they enroll as students therein. In extraordinary cases the Ministry of National Education, Religion, and the Arts had the right to suspend these rules when employees and students were born to Jewish fathers who had converted and Christian mothers of non-Jewish ethnic origin, provided they themselves had been baptized in the Christian religion before the age of two; certain categories of veterans and their descendants were also excluded.67
But even this was not enough: the fascists eliminated the exceptions one month later. Segregated Jewish schools continued to exist, and the system of school apartheid was capped with a prohibition against books written by Jewish authors in public libraries, lists of which were posted there and in bookstores.68
Other Anti-Semitic Legal Measures
During the autumn of 1940, dozens of professional, social, and other associations expelled Jewish members; these included the bar associations, the journalists’ and writers’ unions, the Society of Architects (on its fiftieth anniversary), the Romanian Opera, even the deaf-mute association. Professional and social discrimination went hand in hand with ministerial orders that essentially outlawed the recognition of Jews as human beings. One decision, of September 9, 1940, proclaimed that the Romanian state protected the practice of Roman Orthodoxy (the predominant religion); Roman Catholicism (unified); Latin, Greco-Ruthenian, and Armenian Catholicism; the Reformed (Calvinist) Church; Evangelical Lutheranism; Unitarianism; Armenian Gregorianism; and Islam. The government acknowledged the de facto existence of Judaism, promising that its right to continue to exist would be conditioned by subsequent ministerial provisions; other than these, “religious associations or sects . . . [were] prohibited.”69 Thus the de facto denial of recognition to the Mosaic faith also applied de jure to some of the Protestant “sects,” whose persecution ranged up to and sometimes included deportation orders in 1942 and 1943.70 Nonetheless, the Jews continued to figure as the chief target.
On September 9, 1940, the Ministry of National Education, Religion, and the Arts ruled that synagogues might remain open only with its special approval. In early 1941, Minister Radu Rosetti proposed a ban on conversions of Jews to other religions, for “the ethnic being of our people must be protected against mixture with Jewish blood.”71 By August 26, 1941, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had prohibited Jews access to beaches.72 Then, less than two weeks later, on September 8, the Ministry of National Education, Religion, and the Arts further required that theaters and opera companies relieve all Jewish personnel of their posts. Jewish theaters and theater companies existed, to be sure, but they could not present the works of Romanian authors and they could present other plays only in the Romanian language. A decree of November 20, 1941, “Romanized” movie companies, movie theaters, and travel and tourism agencies. Meanwhile, local administrative agencies prohibited Jews from owning motorcycles and even bicycles.
Some regulations reflected—or, rather, fostered—the notion that security considerations necessitated restrictions on the Jews. Thus a decree of May 7, 1941, forced Jews to turn in their radios to the police. The minister of the interior justified this action to Antonescu (as if Antonescu had to be convinced) by stating that “Jews possessing radios are receiving propaganda news contrary to the general interests of the country, which they then spread, thereby continually inciting the population.”73 An afterthought of May 1, 1942, generously exempted from the radio law certain Jews who had one gentile parent.74
Needless to say, the deprivation of rights left the Jews open to systematic plunder. The state claimed the lion’s share: discriminatory tax measures soon touched real estate, enterprises, and liquid capital alike. A law of October 21, 1941 (originating in the Ministry of the Interior but countersigned in Defense), ordered that Jews render the army, according to annual income, varying quantities of new footwear, clothing, and bedding. It is not surprising that the extortion was backed by the threat of violence: evasion would bring up to ten years in jail, not to mention a fine of 100,000 to 500,000 lei.75 Two months later Jews disabled in World War I from 1916 to 1918 were exempted, but early the next year the government, as if reluctant to be seen as conciliatory, stipulated that the remaining Jews who could not afford the tax in kind would have to pay the exchange value in cash.76
These were hard times for all, and the government sought to guarantee that the most miserable gentile Romanian suffered less than the happiest Jew. Restrictions on the supply of food to Jews constituted an early step in this direction; and the childish vindictiveness of some of the laws underscores the fact that insult was just as important to the fascists as was injury. According to Article 4 of Decree No. 1215 (of mid-1941), for example, Jews were permitted to buy bread, but the purchase of pastries was forbidden them. Beginning on August 14, 1942, Jews had to pay a higher price for bread, which they might purchase only with specially marked ration cards.77 Local administrative measures added to the Jews’ humiliation, as illustrated by the edict of March 25, 1942, by which the military prefect of Botoşani District prohibited farmers from selling their produce to Jewish homes or shops and barred Jews from buying at market or from shopping outside the hours of 10:00 A.M. and noon.78 The mayor of the town of Roman actually prohibited outright the sale of bread to Jews.79 In other districts as well, similar measures were taken.80
Within such a climate why include a “nonpeople” in the nation’s census? Thus, by a statutory decree of December 17, 1940, Romanian Jews (for this purpose, those having at least one Jewish parent) were to be counted separately, based upon their registration with local police departments. Decree No. 1257 of April 30, 1942, would later exempt Jews who had converted to Christianity before August 9, 1940, if they had only one Jewish parent—strange proof that somewhere under the surface the regime still wavered (as we will continue to see in subsequent chapters) in its definitions and its intentions.81
Wearing the yellow (occasionally black) star—that ultimate symbol of dehumanization—was never systematically required of the Jews of Old Romania but only of those living in Transnistria and certain departments of Moldavia, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. During the summer and fall of 1941, it had seemed, however, that no Romanian Jew would be able to avoid donning the star. Immediately after the declaration of war against the USSR on June 22, and following the Iaşi pogrom, Jews were obliged to wear the yellow star in some communities of Moldavia; for example, on July 4, 1941, the commander of the Bacău police announced that all Jewish men and women would have to start wearing the yellow star (two superimposed triangles, six centimeters per side) over the left breast within forty-eight hours. Only Jews in military uniform were excepted.82 In a memorandum sent on July 15, 1941, to Mihai Antonescu, a distant relation to Ion and vice president of the Council of Ministers, Wilhelm Filderman, president of the UER, demanded that this “illegal” measure be rescinded. One of the ironies of history is that Filderman and Antonescu were former schoolmates, a fact that gave Filderman a tentative line of communication to the government. Scarcely two weeks had passed, therefore, when Deputy Minister of the Interior Popescu received Filderman; during their August 2, 1941, discussion Filderman was promised flexibility in the interpretation of the law. His disappointment must have been all the more bitter, then, when the measure remained in force.83
Filderman persisted in demanding elimination of the yellow star. On August 7, 1941, he gained another audience with General Popescu. Filderman later noted that he had “explained, among other things, that this badge was still being worn [in certain towns of Moldavia], even though the minister had ordered it to be discontinued [which he had not—R.I.]. The general explained to me that wearing the badge would be observed throughout the country and showed me a sample of the Star of David and orders that were ready for dissemination throughout Romania.”84
In fact, on August 14, 1941, Order No. 1 from the Botoşani Territorial Military Command stipulated that “the Jewish population, regardless of sex or age, is required to wear, visible on the left side of the chest, a six-pointed star.”85 An identical order (No. 25007) was issued by the Third Army in the district of Baia on August 18, 1941.86 Violation of these provisions was punishable by imprisonment of one month to one year, as well as by fines. In a new memorandum to the Supreme General Staff, Filderman protested these directives and the fact that such orders were already in effect elsewhere, for example, after August 13 in the city of Roman.87 Still, on August 25, Order No. 3 of the Fourth Territorial Command, with authority in the Moldavian districts of Iaşi, Baia, Botoşani, Roman, Bălţi, and Soroca, mandated the wearing of the yellow star for all Jews. Violation was punishable by a prison term of six months to five years.88 Worse still, during an August 27 meeting with Popescu, Filderman learned that “the yellow star would probably be extended to the entire country.” This matter did not fall within Popescu’s authority, he said, but rather within that of Ion Antonescu.89 And then one week later, on September 3, an order (No. 8368) from the National General Inspectorate of the Police stated that the entire Romanian Jewish population would be required to wear a 6-centimeter black star on a white background contained within an 8.5-centimeter square. Baptized Jews would not be obliged to wear this badge.90 The Bucharest Prefecture of Police issued the same order in its municipal jurisdiction on September 5, 1941.91
Also on September 5, 1941, Filderman sent two memoranda, one to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the other to Antonescu himself, “strenuously requesting” cancellation and stating that even German Jews were not obliged to wear a star.92 The memo sent to the head of state declared that Filderman would resign if the measure was not rescinded. The next day Filderman and Chief Rabbi Alexandru Şafran sent another memorandum to Nicodeme, patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, asking him to forbid profanation of the Star of David; there is no evidence that the prelate responded.93 On September 8, Filderman obtained a meeting with Antonescu himself, who, in a good mood, received him and Dr. Nicolae Lupu (a National Peasant party leader who facilitated the meeting, was a politician on good terms with Antonescu, and was sympathetic to the plight of the Jews); the leader agreed to order Mihai Antonescu “to cancel the wearing of the badge throughout the country.”94 Indeed, on September 10, the prefect of police in the capital, N. Radu, sent a written message to the president of the Sephardic Jewish Community stating that following a decision of Marshal Antonescu, Jews would not be required to wear any distinguishing badge. It is not known how many other persons or institutions received similar notices, but in general, as stated, the star was not imposed outside certain localities in Moldavia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria.95 Despite all of this, the rescinded order nevertheless was temporarily imposed on the 350 Jews of Piteşti (near Bucharest) on September 12, 1941.96 As things settled down German diplomats could not refrain from protesting the cancellation of the order for all Romanian Jews, which they did in the pages of the official Bukarester Tageblatt (Bucharest Daily) of December 2, 1941, asserting that the yellow star should be essential in the “New Order”; their words produced little effect.97
In areas where persecution of the Jews was stronger, however, the yellow star was indeed enforced. For example, as late as February 26, 1943, General Corneliu Calotescu, military governor of Bukovina (wherein, unlike Bessarabia, seventeen thousand Jews remained unde-ported), issued an edict reinstating the requirement that Jews wear the star. Violation of the order was to be punishable by internment in a labor camp. Those exempted from this order included converted Jews, Jewish women married to Christians, and Jewish women, even if divorced, whose children were the products of marriages with Christians.98 On August 18, 1943, the fascist newspaper Porunca Vremii (Commandment of the Epoch) proposed the introduction of the Star of David in all of Romania as a distinguishing mark for Jews, citing as the model the measure adopted in Bukovina.99
Filderman’s persistence had become one of the factors leading to the dissolution of the Union of Jewish Communities of Romania and its replacement by the Central Jewish Office, or Centrala Evreilor. This Judenrat, a government-controlled institution to facilitate the persecution of the Jews, grew out of consultations in October 1941 between Mihai Antonescu and his subordinate Radu Lecca, director of the Office for Jewish Problems.100 Lecca acted as the governmental official in charge of the Jewish population until 1943, when some of the responsibility was transferred to the Ministry of Labor. Until then Lecca oversaw the new administrative and economic agency established by the law that Marshal Antonescu had signed into effect on December 16, 1941. The Centrala was responsible for, among other things, the following:
• exclusive representation of the interests of Romanian Jewry and administration of the assets of the former Union of Romanian Jews;
• “reeducation” and organization of Jews for “work and trades”;
• preparations for Jewish “emigration”;
• organization of cultural activities, schools, a newspaper, and self-help;
• organization of Jewish “work projects” and other forms of mobilized labor;
• provision of data required for “Romanization”;
• creation and updating of files on all Romanian Jews, including issuance of photo identity cards that Jews had to carry on their persons;
• receipt of all petitions by Jews; and
• general oversight of the legal system governing the Jews.101
The Central Jewish Office thus became one of the two main venues through which the course of the Holocaust in Romania played out. The other (and more important) means was the series of government actions—sometimes opening the door to mass anarchy—by which Romanian fascists sought to carry out the elimination of Jews from their country. Later, when the tide of war reversed, these two venues were also the most significant in terms of the attempts to retrace steps in an inglorious administrative retreat from genocide, thereby permitting the survival of a large portion of Romanian Jewry.
The Holocaust in Romania culminated in a series of devastatingly cruel deportations carried out under murderous conditions. The administrative and legal measures authorizing these deportations, as well as the evacuations, expulsions, concentration in ghettos, and resettlements of Jews, will be described in the following chapters. The Jewish population of Bessarabia and almost all that of Northern Bukovina were deported or “evacuated,” as was the entire Jewish rural population of Moldavia. “Evacuations” were carried out primarily in northern Moldavia, southern Transylvania, and, to a lesser extent, Walachia. Transit camps and ghettos were established in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Between June 1941 and February 1942, the internment of thousands of Jews as hostages in camps emerged as a widespread practice. After the German-Romanian defeat at Stalingrad, Antonescu increasingly came to see voluntary emigration of the Jews as a solution preferable to forced deportation. But German pressure, the inertia of Romania’s bureaucratic apparatus, and the lack of British and American receptivity impeded hope for a massive voluntary departure. That came only with the end of the war.
Antonescu was able to keep King Michael I in a ceremonial role from September 6, 1940, until August 23, 1944, when the latter took part in the coup during which the marshal was arrested. On December 19, 1944, the king and the minister of justice, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, abrogated all discriminatory laws against the Jews, forbidding all practices based on them. They also abrogated all discriminatory measures various public agencies had employed “in the absence of legal foundation.”102
In Western and much of Central Europe political emancipation had been the product of a long process of mutual reconciliation between Christians and Jews. In Romania emancipation came as the result of external intervention, in the face of strong opposition from both the government and the people.103 This is what occurred after the Paris Peace Conference of 1856 and the Congress of Berlin of 1878; this was the situation that likewise emerged from the Treaty of St. Germain (1919) and the Paris Peace Conference of 1923. As the precarious equilibrium crafted in Europe following World War I fell apart, Romanian leaders essentially annulled Jewish emancipation, perceived by many as unjustly imposed and detrimental to the interests of Romanians. The behavior of the top officials of Romania’s fascist governments attests to this.