Studies in Antisemitism

Ion Popa

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253029898
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

"An important book" that delves into the role of religious authorities in Romania during the Holocaust, and the continuing effects today ( Antisemitism Studies ). In 1930, about 750, 000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light. Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the church in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the church's relationship with the Jewish community in Romania, with Judaism, and with the state of Israel, as well as the extent to which the church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa's highly original analysis illuminates how the church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust memory has been shaped in Romania today.

1

A DANGEROUS “SYMPHONIA”

The Church-State Relationship and Its Impact on the Jewish Community of Romania before June 22, 1941

ALTHOUGH THE STARTING POINT OF the systematic physical destruction¹ of the Romanian Jewish community is believed to be the summer of 1941,² the traces of anti-Semitic policies leading to the Holocaust should be sought in the years prior to the 1941 invasion of the USSR, especially in the policies implemented after December 1937. Anti-Semitic policies were increasingly discussed in Romania in the 1920s and 1930s, but the Goga-Cuza government of December 1937–February 1938 was the first one to radically and irreversibly promulgate such laws. The most important was the Law for the Revision of Citizenship, which in the end stripped Romanian citizenship from 225,222 Jews, representing more than one-third of the entire Jewish population of Romania.³ The Orthodox Church, the main Christian denomination in Romania, to which a majority of 72 percent of the population belonged during the interwar period, was very much involved in the anti-Semitism of the 1930s. Directly or indirectly, the Church supported far-right parties and intellectual movements in their anti-Jewish discourse. But most importantly the increasing involvement in the politics of the country, made eloquent by the nomination of Patriarch Miron Cristea as prime minster of Romania in February 1938, led to a complicity of the Church in the anti-Semitic policies of various Romanian governments from 1938 to 1944.

THE CONTEXT: THE JEWS, THE ORTHODOX CHURCH, AND THE PARTICULARITIES OF THE HOLOCAUST IN ROMANIA

In order to understand the context in which the drama of the Holocaust took place in Romania and the role played by the Orthodox Church in the destruction of the Jewish community, we need some background information. The following pages present a brief history of the Romanian Jews and of the Romanian Orthodox Church’s religious and political attitude toward Judaism prior to 1938. They also highlight several particularities of the Holocaust in Romania.

The Jews of Romania—a brief introduction

Although evidence about the presence of Jews on Romanian territory since the times of the Roman Empire was debated for a long time,⁴ historiography based on several archaeological findings suggests that Jews settled in the Roman provinces of Dacia since the second century A.D.⁵ During the early medieval period, merchant Jews, most of them of Sephardic background, started to settle in the Wallachia and Moldova principalities.⁶ At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Jews from Poland and Galicia, of Ashkenazi origin, emigrated toward these territories, as demonstrated by headstones in cemeteries of major cities such as Botoșani, Iași, Neamţ, and Bucharest.⁷

The principalities of Wallachia and Moldova, which came under Ottoman rule by the fifteenth century, were generally favorable to Jews, some of them holding important positions in the administrative apparatus.⁸ In the nineteenth century, the fate of Jews living on Romanian territory was strongly linked with political and territorial developments. In 1859, Wallachia and Moldova united, forming the first modern state of Romania. In the Constitution of 1866, article 7 stipulated that “Romanian citizenship may be acquired by Christians only.”⁹

After the Russian-Ottoman war of 1877, at the Berlin Peace Conference Romania was recognized as an independent state, one of the conditions of this recognition being the award of full emancipation to the Jews.¹⁰ In the context of increasing anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire many Jews fled to the eastern and northeastern parts of Romania. If at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Jewish population in the two provinces was estimated at around 20,000, at the end of the century it was around 300,000.¹¹ Until 1918, only about 2,000 Jews had received Romanian citizenship, a fact which shows the reluctance of the Romanian authorities to put into practice the conditions of the Berlin Peace Treaty. Beginning in 1876, Jews had to undertake military service, although they could not become officers. Before the First World War, Jews mostly supported leftist parties. According to Haiko Haumann, they could not assimilate in Romanian society before 1918, and this was mainly because they did not have equal rights.¹² After the First World War, Romania doubled its territory: Transylvania and Bukovina (which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Bessarabia (which had been part of the Russian Empire), and Quadrilater (Southern Dobruja, which had been part of Bulgaria) were added to the Old Kingdom of Romania. These territories had large Jewish presence. In the 1930 census, the Jewish population was 756,930 (4.2 percent of the total population).¹³

In Wallachia the Jewish community was mainly a Sephardic one. In Moldova, Bukovina, northern Transylvania, and Bessarabia, most Jews were of Ashkenazi background. Due to their closeness to the Pale of Settlement (the region of Imperial Russia where Jews were allowed permanent residency) and to Galicia (now western Ukraine), important Hassidic centers could be found in these regions, especially Bukovina and northern Transylvania.¹⁴ Due to their different traditions, the Jews of Greater Romania were not a homogeneous community. Reform Judaism of the German and Hungarian types that could be found in Transylvania never took root in Wallachia. On the other hand, the acculturation of the Wallachia Jews (southern Romania), accompanied by the adoption of a Romanian identity, was not entirely mirrored in other parts of the country.¹⁵

In the first decade of Greater Romania’s existence (1918–1928), the number of Jewish students attending Romanian universities increased, especially in the two most important student centers of the interwar period: Iași (Moldova) and Bucharest (Wallachia).¹⁶ In parallel with this process, the Jews, especially those in Bessarabia, developed a very organized system of Jewish education.¹⁷ Although there are no statistics on the extent of linguistic acculturation among Romania’s Jewish communities during the interwar period, in Ezra Mendelsohn’s opinion the Jews of Bessarabia, Bukovina, northern Transylvania, and Moldova continued to speak Yiddish, while the German and Hungarian orientations remained very much alive in Bukovina and Transylvania. “The new generations learned Romanian in school; in Bukovina for example, the great majority of Jewish children attended government schools, and the same was true in Transylvania. Acculturation did not necessarily imply the decline of orthodoxy, at least not in its Transylvanian stronghold.”¹⁸ Many Romanian Jews contributed to the cultural life of the country, in various fields their performance being outstanding.¹⁹

The Jewish community of Romania suffered great losses during the Holocaust. Most of the Jewish population in northern and eastern Romania was killed, while the population of the Old Kingdom was largely saved due to the failed plans to deport the Jews from these territories to Belzec. After the war, most of the approximately 400,000 Jewish survivors left Romania, the majority of them emigrating to Israel. At the end of the Communist era only 20,000 Jews were still in Romania and by 2006 the number, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, was 9,351.²⁰

The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Jews prior to 1938

In 1859 Wallachia and Moldova, two principalities which had been under Ottoman suzerainty for more than four centuries, united under the leadership of Alexandru Ioan Cuza in what is known as the Vechiul Regat (the Old Kingdom) of Romania. In 1872 the political quest for independence of the new state was mirrored by the Orthodox Church; the two metropolitanates of Wallachia and Moldova exited the jurisdiction of the Constantinople Patriarchate and the Metropolitan of Wallachia was elevated to the rank of metropolitan-primate. On April 25, 1885, seven years after the Congress of Berlin confirmed the independence of Romania from Ottoman rule, the Church became autocephalous (self-governing). On February 25, 1925, seven years after the creation of the Greater Romania, the Romanian Orthodox Church was elevated to the jurisdictional territory of a patriarchate, being in dogmatic, liturgical, and canonical communion with the other sister Orthodox Churches.²¹ The metropolitan-primate, Miron Cristea, became the first patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church (1925–1939). During the interwar and war period the Romanian Orthodox Church was divided into five metropolitanates (this is a category specific to Eastern Orthodoxy, similar to some extent to Western archbishoprics), largely corresponding to the historic provinces of Romania. Some of the interwar metropolitans, such as Nicolae Bălan, the metropolitan of Transylvania (1920–1955), Visarion Puiu, the metropolitan of Bukovina (1935–1940) and of Transnistria (1942–1943), Tit Simedrea, the metropolitan of Bukovina (1941–1945), and Irineu Mihălcescu, the metropolitan of Moldova (1939–1947), were influential personalities and played an important role in the Holocaust. In 1939, after the death of Miron Cristea, the Romanian Orthodox Church elected Nicodim Munteanu as the second patriarch of the Church (1939–1948).

The Romanian Orthodox Church has not had a clear and distinct theology concerning Judaism and the Jews; most of the time the guidelines have been represented by Eastern Orthodox Church fathers’ writings and some late medieval Church laws. The Orthodox Church manifested from an early stage a dualistic approach toward Jews, and this was mainly because of the way in which the Church and the state had worked together since medieval times. For example, in a seventeenth-century Church document called the Govora Law (1640) Jewish-Christian relations were forbidden: “Any priest who will have any relation with the Jews, will call them brothers, or will eat at the same table with them will be excluded from the Church.”²² On the other hand, Jews who converted to Christian Orthodoxy were, under Prince (Ruler) Matei Basarab’s state law of 1652, able to become priests and to pursue an ecclesiastical career.²³ The Orthodox theological approach to the conversion of Jews was stipulated in a law from 1764 called “Law/Ordinary Regarding the Way in which the Yids can be accepted for baptism.” According to this law, which still represents the guidelines of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Jewish converts had to complete a pre-catechization and a catechization process before being considered for baptism. The rules were strict: before the catechization began, the aspiring Jewish convert had to pass a series of tests. After the pre-catechization period, the catechumen (aspiring convert) was assigned to a “knowledgeable priest” who “would lead him to the Christian teachings, but, most importantly, would introduce him to the true faith and moral life.” The catechization period varied, the most common being forty days in which the catechumen had to attend Church services and fast. During the entire period, “the priest will always have to be careful and to enquire whether the catechumen wants to be baptized truly for the sake of faith, or [is] driven by other reasons.”²⁴ This emphasis on doubt in the case of an aspiring Jewish convert was suggestive of the distrust of the Orthodox Church. This distrust would continue and would also be felt during the 1938–1942 debates about the conversion of Jews. After the catechization period, the neophyte faced a public examination, and only then could the baptism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Dangerous “Symphonia”: The Church-State Relationship and Its Impact on the Jewish Community of Romania before June 22, 1941
• 2. Perpetrator, Bystander, or Savior? The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (1941–1944)
• 3. The Jewish Community of Romania and the Romanian Orthodox Church in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1945–1948)
• 4. Cleansing the Past, Rewriting History: The Romanian Orthodox Church from Active Involvement in the Holocaust to the Whitewashing Process
• 5. Forgetting the Truth, Forgetting the Dead: The Use of the Holocaust for Political and Religious Agendas and the Persistence of Anti-Semitism (1945–1948)
• 6. Behind Religious Harmony: The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Jewish Community during the Communist Era (1948–1989)
• 7. The Romanian Orthodox Church, Holocaust Memory, and Anti-Semitism during the Communist Era (1948–1989)
• 8. Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Romanian Orthodox Church after 1989: Understanding the Context of Holocaust Memory’s Reemergence in Postcommunist Romania
• 9. The Romanian Orthodox Church and Holocaust Memory after 1989
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index