Les Juifs en Roumanie
The Jews in Romania
Bernard-Lazare
THE OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE
INTRODUCTION
It is only thirty-five years since, in Western Europe, the Jews were completely emancipated. If France was the first, through the Constituent Assembly, to proclaim this liberation on September 27, 1791, and to make a citizen of the age-old slave, their rights were not definitively recognized until 1860 in England, 1864 in Germany, 1866 in Italy — 1870 in Rome — and 1867 in Austria-Hungary. The theological conception of the deicide condemned to eternal servitude had disappeared to make way for a conception of law independent of religious categories, but this had not occurred without resistance, and in Germany, for example, from 1820 to 1850, there was a desire to exclude Jews from the functions of the State, the latter being considered fundamentally Christian.
From that point on, and by the very fact of this transformation, the idea people had of the Jew changed. Until then, what the Church called his obstinatio placed him outside the city of Christ; henceforth, in this modern Europe constituting itself on the principle of nationalities, he would be considered a foreigner, without, however, the theologian’s point of view having disappeared — quite the contrary — though it was no longer openly expressed. If the thinking of clerical reaction was the reconstitution of the Christian state, it concealed this under a national traditionalism which, less brutally shocking, was capable of rallying a greater number of adherents. The fact nonetheless persists, and it appears in a manifest way in contemporary antisemitism. How this differs from the old antisemitism is what we must briefly examine.
Before emancipation, antisemitism was above all juridical. The Jews were subject to legislation derived from Roman law which the Church had, by modifying it according to circumstances and the status of those to whom it could be applied, originally imposed on the barbarian world, and which modern nations had inherited. At first strictly confined to the field of religious controversy, scriptural antisemitism had broadened. As a national middle class formed within Christian societies, it had become its auxiliary in the struggle undertaken when, from its very formation, this class had entered into competition with the Jews, who were partly the holders, within agricultural organizations, of the role of intermediaries as well as that of artisans. Then this scriptural antisemitism, which for centuries had merely corroborated or justified legislation, and in certain cases had led it to specify certain points of detail, had more or less disappeared, the victory being won. Its few representatives in the eighteenth century had given it, so to speak, a historical or recapitulative character. The pamphlets can be counted; no more appeared in France, and the most hateful of those published in Germany, Judaism Unveiled by Eisenmenger, was banned by Emperor Leopold IX, without any protest arising. Moreover, since the sixteenth century, since Reuchlin fighting against the Dominicans, the Jews had found defenders, even apologists, and the movement which was to culminate, on the eve of the Revolution, in the writings of Mirabeau and Gregoire in favor of the emancipation of the Jews, had had many initiators.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, doctrinaire antisemitism reawakened. The liberated Jew became for the Church the symbol of its defeat; it affected to hold him responsible for it, though his role in the battle had been nil, and it was through him that, on several occasions, it undertook the struggle against the secular state. From that moment on, antisemitism had a goal: to revive, adapting it to present necessities, the old restrictive legislation against the Jews. If those who profess it deny being driven by a sentiment of hostility toward the Jewish faith, and if it is true that henceforth religious causes are subordinate to economic causes, whereas formerly they dominated them, these religious causes alone, by reviving the still vigorous force of prejudices two thousand years old, can exacerbate the reasons drawn from competition or chauvinist protectionism. They alone would be capable of bringing theoretical antisemitism to fruition by translating it into law. Will Western Europe see such a regression? It is incontestable that it tends toward one, and in 1901 the Bavarian Diet adopted by 77 votes to 51 the proposal of a Catholic center deputy limiting the number of Jewish judges in Bavaria. This is an isolated fact, but it is nonetheless a symptom, and we have before our eyes the example of what the system can produce when rigorously applied. In two countries of Eastern Europe, the law is still at that stage of its development where it is not separated from a determined religion; in two countries, the Jew is still placed under the regime of exceptional laws: Russia and Romania. In the first, it is true, liberty does not exist, and rights are denied every day; in the second, liberty is inscribed in the Constitution together with rights for all, without distinction of creed, and it is by means of an artifice that the Jew is struck down. It is in these two countries that I wish to show the condition of the Israelites, their economic status as shaped by their religious customs, their social life, and the legal situation in which they have been and remain placed. I shall then examine the solutions to be offered and whether any exist that are independent of the changes to be made in the political and economic condition of these countries themselves.
THE JEWS IN ROMANIA
There is an entire polemical literature on the Jewish Question in Romania, and the bibliography would be very long to compile. I confine myself to referring the reader to a few fundamental works, historical or juridical, and to a few recent studies. The Romanian legislation against the Jews has been classified by Edmond Sincerus: The Jews in Romania (London, Macmillan and Co., 1901); it has been studied by Bluntschli: Der Staat Rumaenien und das Rechtsverhaeltniss der Juden in Rumaenien (Berlin, 1879). The history of the Romanian Jews has been excellently summarized by Dr. E. Schwarzfeld in two articles published by the American Jewish Yearbook, 1901-1902 (Philadelphia, 1901). One may also consult the work of M. J. Plotke: The Romanian Jews Under Prince and King Charles (a French translation was published by l’Aurore, October-November 1901) and the Memorandum of the General Association of Indigenous Israelites, presented to His Majesty the King, to the Government, and to Parliament in April 1893 (a French translation appeared in le Siecle of March 11, 15, and 16, 1901).
The antisemitic sentiment in Romania being founded in part on the theory that the Jew is a newcomer among the descendants of the Dacians, it is well to set forth first the history of Jewish communities in the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. This, not with the aim of seeking what in the mind of the nationalists would be “a title of nobility,” but simply to show how these groups were able to participate in the economic development of the country in which they were settled.
Legend recounts that the Jews came to Dacia in the mythical times of Decebalus, under Domitian. In reality, since from the first centuries of the Christian era Israelite colonies had established themselves on the shores of the Black Sea, some individuals may have come as far as the Danube, just as others came in the eighth century after the conversion of the Khazars. Under the domination of the Galician princes, the ancient towns of Berlad and Galatz welcomed Jews, but there was no real penetration until the thirteenth century, under the reign of Radu Negru (Rudolph the Black), and above all in the fourteenth century, under Vladislav Basarab, when the Jews, driven from Hungary by Louis the Great, took refuge in hospitable Poland and in Wallachia.
At the time of the founding of the principality of Moldavia (1348), they already inhabited certain localities; others flowed in at that moment, and under Roman I (1391) and Alexander the Good (1401) they obtained fairly numerous privileges. Their history, like that of their brethren in Wallachia, is very obscure; it is marked by several massacres and persecutions, such as those they suffered — together with the Gypsies, the Turks, and the Pagans — under the reign of Vlad the Impaler (1456) in Wallachia. The Moldavian princes treated them with more benevolence, notably Stephen the Great (1455), who, from his incursions into Poland, brought back a great number of Jewish prisoners whom he established in Moldavia. It was moreover through Poland that the greatest part of the Jews arrived, in the sixteenth century for example, and above all in the seventeenth, at the moment when the insurrection of the Cossacks of Chmielnitzky and the slaughters that marked it were convulsing and dispersing the Jewish communities. Some, it is true, returned to Poland when Timush, son of Chmielnitzky, came to Moldavia, right up to the walls of Jassy (1652). On this Moldo-Wallachian soil there was a constant coming and going of Jews, favored or mistreated, summoned or driven out; whether one tried to convert them, as Mathew Basarab attempted in Wallachia (1633) by granting dignities to those who embraced Christianity, or whether one extended their rights as did Constantine Brancovan (1689). At the beginning of the eighteenth century they were in a great number of towns, and the Moldavian boyars called them to found settlements on depopulated territories, making contracts with them by which, in exchange for privileges and under penalty of an onerous forfeiture in case of non-performance, the Jews undertook to bring a determined number of families to the new settlements. They were, from then on, commercial intermediaries between the Ottoman lands, Poland, and Russia, and a fairly important class of artisans had been established.
It is only at this time that one sees an antisemitic literature appear, purely theological and founded on religious prejudice. Since there existed no national industry, no commerce, no national art, the economic reasons were nil; they could only arise in the villages if, alongside the peasant, the Jews came to compete with the great landowners; but already they were not allowed to settle outside the towns. It is therefore not the Jew as trader that the pamphlets attack, but still the deicide, the one to whom an old eucharistic superstition, still alive among the most civilized Christian peoples, attributed the use of Christian blood in ritual ceremonies. These accusations of the murder of children, multiplying in proportion to the ambient fanaticism, occurred with frequency in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Romania fell under the domination of the Phanariot princes. This reached such a point that in Wallachia, Constantine Ypsilanti (1804) addressed a rescript to the metropolitan asking for an encyclical declaring these imputations false — a vain step, since they had their source in the propaganda carried on by the clergy itself.
The Jews thereafter suffered the repercussions of all the events that had the Principalities for their theater. During the Russian occupation, artisans and merchants were struck with special taxes, and when in 1812 the Kalmuks entered Bucharest, they sacked principally the Jewish quarter, massacring children whom they carried as trophies on the points of their lances. In 1821, the leader of the Friendly Society, Alexander Ypsilanti, fomenting insurrection against the Turk, after having crossed the Pruth with George Cantacuzene and a small army, launched an appeal to the Dacians, declaring that he wished only to cross Moldo-Wallachia to go to Greece. The boyars and Romanian peasants, oppressed by the Phanariots, did not stir, and left the three pashas of Viddin, Silistria, and Braila to defeat Ypsilanti and drive him back into Austria. But the Hetairists could think of nothing better, as a prelude to the liberation of Greece, than to massacre the Jews. Guided by the Greek monks of Moldavia, they avenged their defeat on a disarmed flock whose blood flowed in torrents. With the restoration of the native princes, the situation of the Jews improved, whether during the reigns that passed under the Russian protectorate, or even in the first period of the union campaign between Wallachia and Moldavia. If on the one hand, in 1848, some measures were taken against the Israelites, on the other hand, in that same year 1848, the committee of Romanian regeneration inscribed in its program the emancipation of the Israelites and the equality of political rights for citizens of all religions. The Jews lived in peace, and except for the riot at Galatz in April 1859, provoked by a false accusation of ritual murder — the arrested accused were all released and their innocence demonstrated — their existence among the people was not disturbed. It was only after the union and under the reign of Prince Charles of Hohenzollern that the persecutions resumed. They thenceforth had a distinctly social and political character, and religious causes intervened only feebly. We shall set forth their character before and after the Treaty of Berlin, which claimed to settle the Jewish question in Romania, a question that Romanian excesses had themselves placed before Europe; but first, it is indispensable to cast a glance at the economic condition of the Principalities.
In the nineteenth century, when they passed under the protectorate of Russia, they had a purely feudal regime. A class of great landowners, the boyars, Romanian or Romanianized, and among them Greeks who had come with the Phanariot princes — they numbered in all seventy-five in Wallachia, three hundred in Moldavia — exempt from all charges, alone had the right to occupy the high functions of the State. Below them, a petty nobility, coarse, exercising minor public offices or living from the land; alongside, a clergy of monks, Greek monks, possessing a fifth of the Romanian land; at the bottom, the mass of peasants, serfs of the soil, exploited by the landowners or their tenants, oppressed by the tax collectors, paying the tax alone and dying of hunger to pay it; lower still, the Gypsy slaves of the boyars. The middle class, no more than the working class, existed. Commerce was held by the Greeks, the Armenians, and some Jews; the small industrialists and artisans were almost exclusively composed of Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Jews. The Serbs, Bulgarians, and Hungarians were mainly in Wallachia, the Jews in Moldavia.
During the Russian protectorate, the economic condition scarcely changed. If the Organic Regulation of 1831 established a judicial organization, a regular system of accounting, and virtually created public education, it did not modify the oligarchic constitution of the country; taxes continued to strike only the peasants, and the boyars retained all their privileges. The extent of the parcel of land that the owner was required to place at the disposal of his serfs was even reduced; instead of twenty-four hectares, those of the first category were entitled to no more than six. (1) Unable to raise livestock for lack of meadows — livestock that had been his resource until then — the farmer grew still poorer, while the holders of the land grew rich by trading in their cereals at the moment when the Treaty of Adrianople opened the Black Sea to international commerce, and by sowing the fallow lands and the terrains they had taken back from the peasants. But during those years, thanks to the laws that created free primary and secondary schools of the first degree, an intellectual class formed which, completely separated by its culture from the mass of the nation, constituted the nucleus of politicians and civil servants destined to govern Romania. Without connection or affinity with the people, acquiring their higher education exclusively abroad, this class soon had no point of contact with those it was called upon to represent; it followed the fluctuations of European ideology and never concerned itself with reconciling it with the reality of the economic facts governing Moldo-Wallachia.
(1) The peasant of the first category was one who had four oxen. The one of the second, who had two oxen, received three and a half hectares of land. The one of the third category had no oxen and was entitled to only two and a half hectares.
The situation scarcely changed after the emancipation of the peasants in 1864. From that day, on the contrary, the agrarian problem posed itself more formidably than ever, for it was complicated by a commercial and industrial problem. From the search for their solutions emerged a violent antisemitism at the same time as an entire system of xenophobic and protectionist laws was elaborated, such as no European nation, no doubt, has ever known.
The rural law emancipated the Romanian peasant. (1) From the moment of its entry into force, in 1865, it assigned to 400,000 individuals two million hectares; but it was incapable, on the one hand, of preventing the inevitable subdivision, and on the other, of placing in the hands of these small possessors the means to exploit their plot of land. Unable to make the soil productive, the peasant tended to alienate it and to become again the slave of the large landowner; multiplying, he saw his parcel shrink, and tended to transform himself into an agricultural laborer. How did the Romanian government remedy these two phenomena? It first forbade, as early as 1866, contracts of sale and lease, and inscribed in the Constitution of 1884 that peasant property would be inalienable until 1916; then it proceeded to roundabout distributions of lands taken from its domains. (1) But it could not prevent the peasant from burdening himself with debt by borrowing to procure the means of cultivating and producing.
(1) The law stated: “The peasants subject to corvee are placed in full ownership of the plots in their possession. In no case may the quantity of land that becomes the property of the peasants exceed two-thirds of the land on which they are established. Those who may transfer to the nearest State lands: a) Peasants who inhabit land whose two-thirds are insufficient to give each the extent determined by law; b) Married men who do not possess the extent of land determined by law… Are forever abolished in Romania the corvee, the tithe, free transport on the owner’s account, the transport of firewood, and all charges or dues, whether in kind or in money. For the redemption of the corvee and dues, the peasants were to pay for fifteen years annuities of 56, 42, and 28 francs, according to category. The owners were, in exchange for their lands, to receive communal bonds bearing 10% interest and redeemable in fifteen years. Moreover, to liquidate these bonds, the government was authorized during these fifteen years to sell to peasants lands from the State domains, at the price of 60 francs per hectare, payable in fifteen years, without more than ten hectares being sold to the same family.”
The middle class, industrial and commercial, was constituted only with extreme slowness: it barely exists today. Romanian youth did not contribute to its formation. Almost entirely from the petty nobility, recently come into possession of a stock of democratic ideas without any real foundation, it had not abandoned its ancestral prejudices. For it, work of whatever kind was vile, and its conception went no further than that of an agricultural society in which the landowners would be flanked by an important army of civil servants, also nourished by the producer. It was realized to such a point that today in Romania there are 23,371 civil servants drawing 63,060,991 francs out of a budget of 240 million. Supported by the politicians whose best agents they are, they help to maintain the peasant in his precarious condition, and if they serve other interests, these are those of the tiny commercial and industrial category that has slowly formed. (1)
(1) “The Romanians,” says Xenopol, the most serious Romanian historian, “are either peasants, farmers, or civil servants.”
However, there exists in Romania a petty-bourgeois class and a proletariat of artisans; but they are composed principally of foreigners and Jews, who came little by little, as needs arose, and as the national labor force was incapable of satisfying them. It was the Romanians themselves who called these Jews and foreigners, and the struggle they sustain today against them stems from their inability to reconcile their chauvinism, born of the struggles for independence and liberty, with economic necessities and with the liberal ideology they have borrowed from nations whose economic development has long since surpassed the stage at which Romania finds itself. In 1848, the reformist committee of Wallachia, as well as the Moldavian liberals, demanded a republican constitution and the emancipation of the Jews; the democratic party, especially in Moldavia, is today the great promoter of the xenophobic, protectionist, and antisemitic movement. Why? Because since 1848 a tiny bourgeoisie has been born, composing in part that second electoral college which the civil servant and the “ciocoi” (democratic) deputy need, and because, scarcely born, it demanded to be freed from foreign and Jewish competition. And in this country overrun by civil servants, the struggle took a curious form: it gradually came to regard as public functions the exercise of most trades and industries, beginning, as we shall see, with the tobacco and liquor monopolies, and ending with the drugstore and the grocery. Worker protection was also established, to satisfy the minority of Romanian artisans, and perhaps to reserve an outlet for the peasant, who must be partially urbanized if one does not wish to be driven to a formidable peasant revolt.
Let us now see what the Jews are in Romania, how they have behaved in this country in formation, and how there has been a reaction against them.
For the needs of polemic, the current number of Jews in Moldo-Wallachia has been alternatively increased or reduced; for the same needs, their origin has been disputed. On the one hand, the Jewish population was estimated at 600,000 souls in a country of six million inhabitants, and one affected to fear that it would absorb the Romanians, less well equipped to struggle advantageously on the economic terrain; at the same time, it was declared that this tenth part of Romania’s inhabitants was not an indigenous element but, on the contrary, an invading one. On the other hand, there was a tendency to reduce the total of the Israelites to 200,000, and they were all presented as autochthonous or, at least, established since time immemorial.
We have shown that, as far back as one goes in the history of Dacia and the Principalities, one finds organized Jewish communities; we have also shown that, as a consequence of the state of war that was almost permanent in the Danubian regions, an incessant coming and going of peoples, among them the Jews, had occurred across frontiers whose boundaries were variable. When the state of war no longer justified this ebb and flow of men, a permanent current of invasion nonetheless continued, composed of Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, coming to Romania to take the place of the indigenous classes that had been unable to form. From 1866 on, the moment when persecution against the Jews resumed and became systematic, Israelite immigration stopped or at least became insignificant, individual. Moreover, the country’s situation compelled it to slow down; the population had grown by itself and through the assimilation of the Bulgarian and Serbian elements which, thanks to the commonality of religion, had been rapidly absorbed, and immigrants no longer had places to take. Now, already a census gave, in Moldavia alone, for 1775 and 1793, 4,000 Jewish taxpayers, representing a minimum of twenty-five thousand souls. The last official census, that of 1899, records 269,015 Jews for Moldavia and Wallachia. (1) If one wishes to calculate the normal growth over a hundred years of a highly prolific population of more than 25,000 individuals — for there were many Jews in Wallachia as well — one will see that, even taking into account the fact that Bessarabia, where they were in fairly large numbers, was annexed in 1812 to Russia, the invasion of foreign Jews, Hungarian or Galician, was less serious than has been claimed. It was nonetheless real and inevitable, as Romanian towns and countryside were constantly calling upon foreign production and labor.
(1) The census of 1894 had recorded 243,225 Jews, and at that time M. Stourdza gave from the tribune of Parliament the number of 482,188.
There are therefore 269,000 Jews in Romania. What is held against them? Are the grievances against them justified? We have just answered the first, the one that says: the Jews are newcomers in Romania. For forty years immigration has stopped; the present Jewish generation was, in immense majority, born on Romanian soil, and it has been so fully considered as Romanian that it has been subjected to military service; moreover, the country has benefited to this day from its commercial or productive activity. We shall return to this point when we set forth the legislation against foreigners, for there lies the key to the Jewish question in Romania.
What are the other reproaches, which, moreover, all derive from the first? The Jews have, it is said, neither historical nor moral connection with the country. They have different customs due to their different religion, and they refuse to assimilate by learning the language of those among whom they live and by conforming to their customs. After the principle of Romanianizing the Jews through schooling had prevailed, they were accused of being more eager to educate themselves than the Romanians; (1) but this grievance, contradicting the preceding one, did not dispel the prejudice that the Jew was unassimilable. (1)
(1) Assertions of M. Poni, Minister of Public Education, before the Romanian Parliament in 1896.
(1) The question of the assimilation or non-assimilation of the Jew, and that of the meaning attached to this word, deserves to be treated separately. For the present, one can nevertheless say that the Jew assimilates rather too much than too little, and the only thing that seems to maintain him within nations is religion, even when he does not practice it.
The Jews, it is further said, have monopolized commercial activity. This is true not only of certain Jews but also of foreigners; however, they did not monopolize in the sense of the word — they occupied a social position that the natives could not fill, to the great detriment of Romania itself. They intoxicate the peasant, it was formerly asserted; the law on beverages has reduced this accusation to nothing; it proved that the peasant was intoxicated by alcohol regardless of the publican who sold it to him. In Wallachia, moreover, where Jews had never been tavernkeepers, alcoholism wrought the same ravages as in Moldavia, and these have not diminished since honest Orthodox voters have been fulfilling these functions. They reduce the Romanians to misery through usury, it is further asserted. Usury is one of the causes that have made the peasant miserable, but it is not the only cause, and in any case it is not the primary cause; usury is fatally brought about by the agricultural constitution of the country, by the way in which peasant property was formed, by the poor organization of credit, by the circumstances that placed the peasant in possession of the soil without giving him the means to make it productive. That a certain number of Jews engaged in moneylending is undeniable; usury is not a Christian monopoly. (1) In the countryside of Moldavia and Wallachia, the Jewish usurer competed with the Greek usurer and the Armenian usurer, but his usury was comparatively benign, for he could not seize the security on which he lent, and he had an interest in treating his borrower gently. In fact, if the peasant’s goods are now mortgaged, they are mortgaged to the Romanian Mortgage Bank and the Agricultural Credit, where the conditions can only be harsh, given that in 1899 the National Bank raised its discount rate to 10%. Moreover, these Jewish usurers, whatever their influence, are but a tiny fraction; it suffices to examine the real economic situation of the Romanian Israelites to be convinced of this.
(1) It does, however, become so in Romania, as in the greater part of Russia.
The Jews together with the foreigners form the majority of the merchants and artisans: about two-thirds, and in certain localities in Moldavia they are 90%. Excluding a few large merchants and industrialists and a minority belonging to the middle bourgeoisie, they practice all trades: upholsterers, tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, cabinetmakers, masons, roofers, blacksmiths, turners, coachmen, commission agents, water carriers, porters, cesspool cleaners, port workers, ship unloaders, factory workers, etc. This is an almost entirely urban population, since the census of 1899 records, out of 269,000 Jews, 190,000 inhabitants of towns called urban, as opposed to towns, market towns, and settlements called rural, thanks to an artifice whose aim was to drive the Jews from the villages. Considering that some of these large settlements still have a Jewish population that could not be totally eliminated, one sees that the immense majority of the Israelites is urbanized. This concentration in the cities, obtained by systematic pushing back, has had as its consequence an impoverishment and a proletarianization of those pushed back. The restrictive laws, since 1872, have hastened this proletarianization and created an ever-growing category of the workless.
Let us take two medium-sized towns: in Bacau, out of 7,924 Jews, of whom 4,658 are children, there are a thousand artisans. The rest is composed of paupers and small traders. In Roman, out of 1,378 heads of families, 348 are artisans, not counting journeymen; the remainder of the Jewish population is made up of small traders and paupers as in Bacau, as in all the towns of Romania. Over the past fifteen years, the number of the destitute has further increased. The peddlers have been ruined by the law on itinerant commerce, and Jewish workers, making no progress in their trades, excluded as they are from the professional schools, have been unable to withstand competition from German workers, whose influx into Romania has been so considerable. To these causes of economic decline must be added the persecutions properly speaking, the vexations, and finally the entire system of legislation. We shall set them forth successively and shall then see clearly the present state of the Romanian Jews.
If, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Jews had suffered in the Principalities, one can say that it had not been at the hands of the inhabitants; they had been the victims of all the foreign interventions — victims of wars or troubles stirred up by the Greeks, the Turks, or the Russians — of which Moldo-Wallachia was the theater. The boyar, needing the Jew as intermediary, protected him, especially in Wallachia, and the peasant, except when stirred up by the monks, lived on good terms with him. When the country regained tranquility under the Russian protectorate, the situation of the Israelites improved; it did not become bad again until after the election of Cuza in 1859 as head of the United Principalities. When real political competitions began, the parties fought on the backs of the Jews. The theoretical liberals demanded their emancipation, counting on the support of this future electoral mass; the democrats, supported by the nascent petty bourgeoisie, demanded new limitations on their rights. The Hohenzollern reign brought violence and restrictive measures.
The first erupted from the very accession to the throne of the “foreign prince” demanded by all parties. They were the consequence of the efforts of Prime Minister Bratiano to emancipate the Israelites by introducing for this purpose an article into the draft constitution that he submitted to Parliament. This article, imposed by Jean Bratiano and Rosetti on their conservative colleagues in the Catargi cabinet, said: “Religious confession is not an obstacle to naturalization in Romania. With regard to the Israelites, a special law will regularize their admission to naturalization and consequently to civil rights.” When it came up for discussion before the Chamber, the Moldavian petty bourgeoisie protested with violence through its representatives. To pressure the deputies, the editor of a democratic-antisemitic paper, Cesar Bolliac, roused the crowd; Jewish homes were sacked, the synagogue of Bucharest demolished, Israelites mistreated. Faced with the riot, the ministry took fright, withdrew its proposal, and had Article 7 of the Constitution voted, which declared that only Christians could become Romanian citizens. A year later, the real leader of the Kretsoulesco ministry, Jean Bratiano, who had inscribed in the reformist program of 1848 the emancipation of the Jews and had tried in 1866 to have it enshrined in the Constitution, Jean Bratiano — to buy in 1867 the votes of the Moldavians and push through his project of military reorganization — took measures against the Jews. He revived Article 50 of the Organic Regulation and the circulars forbidding them to reside in rural communes, to lease properties, and to become innkeepers or tavernkeepers. At the same time, he allowed the serious riots of Jassy to take place, confining himself, faced with the protests of the Powers, to repudiating religious persecutions by a purely platonic governmental declaration. The police, the troops, the civil agents were not deceived: everywhere the Jews were arrested as vagabonds, driven from villages, expelled, and repulsed with such brutality that at Galatz, Romanian soldiers threw eighteen unfortunate Israelites into the Danube, two of whom were drowned.
This crime caused a sensation; the foreign consuls submitted a note to the prefect of Jassy to protest against such odious barbarity. An interpellation took place in the English Parliament: Lord Strafford asked the government of the Queen to intervene. After these manifestations, there was a halt in the persecutions, but it was brief; the Jewish question had to exist in the interest of the politicians, and it was not allowed to be forgotten. From the beginning of 1868, antisemitic disturbances broke out at Berlad, Calarash, and Galatz, while thirty-one deputies belonging to the independent liberal faction proposed to drive the Jews from rural communes and to let them settle in urban communes only with the consent of the municipal councils. This motion was followed by new riots that came just in time, as if to demonstrate its necessity. At Bacau, the Israelite cemetery was profaned and five hundred families were driven out after their houses were set ablaze (April 1868). Once again, the European consuls protested against the Romanian atrocities; a new interpellation was filed at the House of Lords. Lord Stanley replied, condemning “such a series of oppressive acts which have been perpetrated without any reasonable or even recognizable motive.” Faced with this reprobation, the Romanian cabinet sent a note to the Powers, committing itself to resolve the Jewish question, “to the honor of our century,” it said, “and without national interests being harmed.”
A period of calm followed; the democrats feared foreign interventions, and the word went out from them: no more public outbursts, no more riots; they confined themselves to vexatious administrative measures. Nevertheless, during the summer of 1870, the disturbances resumed. At Bacau, Tecuci, Botoshani, Jewish houses and shops were demolished and pillaged, their owners beaten and wounded; in 1871 and 1872, other towns were agitated in the same fashion, with an aggravation however: at Cahul and Vilcin, the representatives of Romanian civilization violated Jewish women and girls. Europe, then quicker to be moved, still concerned with liberal and just hypocrisy, intervened again. Interpellations took place in the German Reichstag, the English House of Commons, and the Dutch Parliament; the American Government asked France to act, and Turkey, suzerain of the Principalities, urged the Romanian cabinet to remedy such a state of affairs. At the same time, an emigration movement arose among the persecuted, and the ministers of Prince Charles, frightened by the possible consequences of an exodus of wretches, reduced to flight and relying for survival on public charity, took measures whose consequence was a few years of relative peace, until the end of 1876.
At the beginning of 1877, the hunt for Jews resumed; only the Russo-Turkish War and the participation of the Romanian army in the campaign halted it.
After the defeat of Turkey, after the capitulation of Plevna, the occupation of Antivari by the Montenegrins and of Adlich by the Serbs, after the Treaty of San Stefano, the Powers acted. Concerned to save the Ottoman Empire by safeguarding their interests compromised by Slavic ambition, they assembled in Berlin, at England’s instigation, a congress to reform the pact of San Stefano and settle the situation of the Balkan and Danubian principalities.
The congress opened on June 13, 1878; from its deliberations came the independence of Romania and its elevation to a kingdom; but the Jewish question had too often agitated the parliaments for it not to be raised before the European plenipotentiaries. It was, and the Powers recognized Romania’s independence only subject to the modification of Article 7 of the Constitution. (1) Article 44 of the treaty of July 13, 1878, stated: “In Romania, the distinction of religious beliefs and confessions shall not be opposed to anyone as a ground for exclusion or incapacity with respect to the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public offices, functions, and honors, or the exercise of different professions and industries, in whatever locality. The freedom and outward practice of all forms of worship shall be assured to all nationals of the Romanian State as well as to foreigners, and no hindrance shall be placed either upon their relations with their spiritual heads or upon the hierarchical organization of the different communions. The nationals of all the Powers, whether merchants or others, shall be treated in Romania without distinction of religion on a footing of perfect equality.”
(1) The article that stated that only Christians could be naturalized as Romanians.
After the promulgation of this article, the Romanian Jews could believe themselves free. They were mistaken; they were simply called upon to undergo a new and indirect system of persecution, which was to weigh upon them more heavily than ever. In announcing to Prince Charles the decisions of the congress, Bratiano and Cogalniceano said that “the meaning of this decision suffered no equivocation: the rights of citizens were to be accorded to the Jews.” Immediately the Romanian patriots took advantage of the chauvinist emotion produced upon a victorious people — which knew for the first time the pride of military glory — by the loss of a province (Bessarabia, left to Russia) and the agitation began. While the government announced its intention to observe the conditions of the treaty and the Senate and the Chamber approved it, it tried to evade Article 44. It wished to satisfy the Moldavian opposition, which seemed determined to go so far as rioting in order to “prevent Romania from being absorbed by the Jews.” Emissaries were sent to the Powers to bring them to find sufficient “the assurance given that the clause of the Treaty of Berlin would be executed later.” The European cabinets refused to content themselves with this promise; they demanded, before recognizing Romania, that it pronounce definitively, and in the indicated sense, on the question.
To gain time, the Romanian ministry had an examination made of which Jews should be conferred the rights of citizens. It asked whether one should grant “naturalization to all the Jews, or to certain categories, or to each individually, and whether the recognition should take place through administrative channels or through legislative acts.” England, France, and Germany protested, all the more so since the Romanian delegate, the former democratic emancipator Rosetti, considered the Jews as foreigners. Prince Charles then intervened. He asked the metropolitan of Jassy to preach tolerance — which clearly shows, despite later denials, that the religious reasons for antisemitism still existed (1) — and, at the instigation of one of the rare Moldavian conservatives who was liberal, M. Pierre Carp, he proposed to the council of ministers the following solution: 1st, Strike the restrictive article from the Constitution; 2nd, Grant the right of citizenship to Jews who were born in the country — notably if their parents themselves were already born there — and who have never enjoyed foreign protection. This on the following conditions: a) Fulfilling military service; b) Paying the personal tax; c) Having attended a Romanian school; d) Practicing a trade in the country, etc.
(1) These religious causes are not always concealed by the Romanian antisemites. The Antisemitic Alliance of Romania, founded in 1895, gave itself among other things as its object (paragraph 2 of chapter one of its statutes): “The safeguarding and development of the religious sentiment, the struggle against the corrupting action of the Jews and against the demoralization caused by the bad interpretation of humanitarian principles.” A notable man, M. Xenopol, rector of the University of Jassy, wrote to a Jewish journal (Univers Israelite, March 1900) to set forth, in two articles, that the solution of the Jewish question in Romania was the baptism of the Jews, the Jewish religion being the obstacle to assimilation. According to him, one should: “absolutely refuse naturalization to unbaptized Jews, as well as any hope of public career, and on the contrary immediately naturalize any baptized Jew and forthwith open to him all avenues.” If it is true on the one hand that the Jew is the leech of the Romanian people, how can one explain that this leech becomes inoffensive through the virtue of baptism!
This effort of the prince was futile. While, in effect, M. Stourdza, Minister of Finance, negotiated in this direction, the initiative commission of the Romanian Chamber was elaborating a project to which an enormous majority rallied, and whose capital principles were:
“1st, There exist no Romanian Israelites and there have never been any, but rather foreign Israelites, who are indeed born in the country but have not assimilated either through their language or their customs with the Romanian nation, and do not even aspire to do so;
“2nd, Naturalization may be granted to any foreigner without difference of confession, individually and by virtue of a special law;
“3rd, The form under which naturalization may take place must be prescribed by the Constitution;
“4th, The right to acquire rural real estate shall be a political right, not a civil one.”
The president of the council opposed the admission of the project; he knew that M. Stourdza was intriguing with the Powers to obtain that they content themselves with a promise of execution of Article 44 of the Treaty of Berlin, in exchange for the immediate naturalization of certain categories of Jews:
1st, Those who had satisfied the military law and served under the flag;
2nd, Those who had acquired academic degrees in Romania and attended the first five classes of a Romanian lyceum;
3rd, Those who had made donations to the State, to charitable or educational institutions;
4th, Those who had published a work in the Romanian language;
5th, Those who had founded factories, except distilleries;
6th, Urban landowners having a revenue of at least a hundred ducats, and merchants and industrialists paying a direct fiscal tax on income of eighty piastres.
For all those not included in these categories, they could obtain individual naturalization by conforming to the prescriptions of Article 16 of the Civil Code of 1864, according to which: any foreigner, after ten years of residence, “may be naturalized, on his request and on the initiative of the prince, by the legislative body, if he has shown himself through his conduct and his actions useful to the country.”
On the one hand, the English and French Governments protested against this conception according to which the Jews were considered as foreigners, which no nation could admit, since they were declared born in the country and subject to military service. On the other hand, the Romanian antisemites did not even want to accept naturalization by categories, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Boeresco formally declared so. Faced with Romanian bad faith, M. Waddington asked, in agreement with England, that the following article be introduced into the Constitution: “Individuals born in Romania and raised there until their majority, who shall never have been foreign subjects, shall immediately obtain, by virtue of the principle contained in Article 44 of the Treaty of Berlin, all civil and political rights.”
If the European entente had persisted, the Romanian opposition would have been broken; but the temporizing, the delay in executing the commitments made, allowed it to resist further and finally to triumph by breaking that entente. It was Germany which on this occasion was the necessary ally. The Romanian cabinet profited with skill from the antisemitic current fomented in the Empire by the party of the evangelical pastors, supported by the conservatives and the agrarians. The question of the Romanian railways also weighed on the German will. In the companies formed for the execution of the Romanian railways, the Silesian magnates had engaged considerable capital; they had an essential interest in obtaining from the Romanian government a compliant assent to the buyout conditions imposed, as well as an equally compliant approval of the first report concerning their operation. For this, it was necessary that the kingdom be recognized by the Powers. Germany, guided by the interests of its capitalists, obtained from Europe that it content itself with a platonic declaration. Article 7 of the Romanian Constitution, which said: “The status of Romanian is acquired, preserved, and lost according to the rules determined by the civil laws; foreigners of the Christian rite alone may obtain naturalization,” was abrogated and replaced by the following:
The difference of religious beliefs and confessions does not constitute in Romania an impediment to the acquisition and exercise of civil and political rights.
Section 1. — Any foreigner, without distinction of religion, whether or not subject to a foreign protection, may obtain naturalization under the following conditions:
a) He shall address to the government a request for naturalization indicating the capital he possesses, the profession he exercises, and his intention to establish his domicile in Romania.
b) From the date of this request, he shall elect domicile for ten years in the country and prove by his acts that he is useful to it.
Section 2. — May be dispensed from the waiting period:
a) Those who shall have introduced into Romania useful industries or inventions, those who shall have distinguished talents, or those who shall have founded in the country large establishments of commerce and industry.
b) Those who, born and raised in Romania of parents established there, have never enjoyed, nor have their parents, a foreign protection.
c) Those who served under the flag during the war, and who may, on the proposal of the government, be naturalized collectively by a single law.
Section 3. — Naturalization may be accorded only individually and by virtue of a law. (1)
Section 4. — A special law shall determine the manner in which foreigners may establish their domicile in Romania.
Rights acquired to this day are respected.
Existing international conventions shall remain in force with all the clauses and delays stipulated therein.
(1) Under this system and its strict application — and it is this mode of application that has always been imposed upon the Jews — a man may be naturalized without his wife being so. A Jew may be a Romanian, and his children born before naturalization are “foreigners not subject to a foreign protection.”
To give Europe a measure of its sincerity, Romania immediately naturalized 900 Jews who had taken part in the war of independence. Since most had died on the battlefield, only two hundred individuals actually benefited from Moldo-Wallachian generosity. In response, Germany, England, and France submitted to the Romanian cabinet an identical note, whose text follows:
“The Government cannot recognize as entirely meeting the views that guided the Powers signatory to the Treaty of Berlin the new constitutional provisions of which it has been given notice and, in particular, those from which it follows that persons of non-Christian rite domiciled in Romania and not belonging to any foreign nationality are subject to the necessity of submitting to the formalities of an individual naturalization.
“Nevertheless, trusting in the will of the princely government to come ever closer, in the application of these provisions, to the liberal thought that inspired the Powers, and taking note of the formal assurances that have been transmitted to it in this regard, the Government, in order to give the Romanian nation a testimony of its feelings of friendship, has decided to recognize, without further delay, the principality of Romania as an independent State.”
The trust was well placed, and the Romanian government’s assurances were sincere. Indeed, since 1879, out of 269,000 Jews, two hundred have been naturalized. They were, it is true, faithful to the liberal spirit of the Treaty of Berlin: they have no longer legislated against the Jews. They have legislated against foreigners, and have applied the laws to the Jews by virtue of that very abandonment by Europe, which allowed its decisions to be violated by permitting the individual naturalization of individuals born in a country, sons of fathers born in that country.
However, it was difficult to apply this xenophobic code with impunity to natives without arousing violent recriminations. Two things above all embarrassed Romania and hardly allowed it to treat the Jews as foreigners on the pretext of their voluntary particularism. The Jews, eager for education, had rapidly Romanianized themselves, and they paid the most national of taxes: that of blood. Thus, while the initial tendency had been to elevate the Jew and to assimilate him through military service and schooling, the second tendency was to re-Judaize him by making it impossible for him to educate himself, and to strip him of his rights as a Romanian by no longer accepting him in the army. The first problem has been more or less resolved; not yet the second: the Jew is still a soldier. How and why is he one, and by virtue of what doctrine does one wish to prevent him from remaining so? He is one by virtue of the Constitution and the law. They would wish him to be no longer, because as long as he is, even the literal interpretation of the various military laws will not permit the legitimate application to him of the legislation against foreigners, and it will be imposed upon him only through scandalous arbitrariness.
Article 118 of the Romanian Constitution states: “Every Romanian is part of the regular army, the militia, or the civic guard, in accordance with the special laws.” As for the Jews, they have always been subject to military service; but the law imposing it on them has constantly varied in its motives and its preambles.
According to the law of 1864, the Jews were recruited as “foreigners who inhabit the country and who are not subject to a foreign protection.” But the law of 1868, abrogating the preceding one, declared (Article 2) that “all the inhabitants of the country, with the exception of foreigners, must bear arms,” and the law of March 27, 1872, did not modify this article. Now, after 1868, the Jews continued to serve under the flag; they were therefore considered, ipso facto, as Romanians. In 1876, at the moment when the Jewish question was being posed with more acuteness than ever, on the eve of the resumption of persecutions, the implications of such a state of affairs were understood, and the stipulations of the law of 1864 were returned to.
From 1878 to 1882, in order to have valid arguments to oppose to foreign diplomacy, secret circulars were sent to the revision councils ordering them to exclude the Jews. Moreover, those young Israelites who could not read were made to sign, and the others were compelled to sign, a declaration by which they acknowledged themselves to be sons of non-naturalized foreigners and “asked not to be subject to the recruitment law.” But in 1882, the government, unsure of this system, had Articles 1 and 2 of the law of 1896 modified and drafted as follows:
Article 1. — All the inhabitants of the country owe personal military service.
Article 2. — Subjects of foreign States may not be part of the army.
This was to return to the law of 1864 in a roundabout and less brutal fashion. It was to say that the Jews were incorporated as inhabitants of the country, not subject to a foreign protection. These texts nevertheless alarmed the Moldavian antisemites. To respond to their fears — they dreaded that Jews could be at the head of the army — General Manou, Minister of War, declared that only Romanians could obtain the rank of officer. To those who observed that “those who serve the fatherland must equally enjoy the rights of citizens,” General Manou replied: “The blood tax one pays has nothing to do with naturalization. A son of a foreigner born in the country can draw lots and serve in the army as much as he can; he will not for all that become a Romanian citizen.” (1)
(1) According to Article 2 of the law: “Children of foreigners born in the country may not be exempted from military service if they do not certify that they have fulfilled this obligation in another country.”
To those who feared foreign intervention, the liberal Bratiano, President of the Council, replied that the European states, having now become antisemitic, would not intervene.
The law was voted, but according to its stipulations, the Jew could henceforth neither enlist as a volunteer, nor advance in rank, nor reenlist, nor benefit from the exemptions conferred by certain diplomas, nor take service in the rural gendarmerie. The Romanian Chamber believed that the problem of making the Jew a soldier while not making him a citizen was solved, and it thought it had answered in advance the representations of the Powers, always to be feared under the pressure of certain circumstances.
It was necessary, this being established, to show that the Jews were not Romanianizable and thus could not claim to enjoy civil or political rights. Now, in the eyes of the anti-Jewish groups and the successive governments that thenceforth served them, the wrong course had been followed until then by civilizing the Jews and by tearing them from the purely religious schools which, by making them particular, contributed to separating them from the people. From the beginnings of the school organization, the schools of the Principalities were freely accessible, and the law of 1852 opened them to all. Simultaneously, the Jews were summoned there by privileges accorded to those of them who attended. The law of 1854 on recruitment in Moldavia exempted from military service those Jews who had completed their studies in public educational establishments and produced the required certificates. After the union of the Principalities, the same spirit persisted. The law of 1864 on education decreed compulsory instruction, and a circular of 1865 urged the Israelite communities to send their children to State schools, asking of them only that they remunerate the teachers who would teach Hebrew and religion. The aim, said the circular, was, by suppressing confessional schools, to mingle Jewish youth with Romanian youth. “Let the Jews,” it added, “not wish for separate schools, for the separation of schools will perpetuate their separation from the nation.”
Article 13 of the Constitution of 1866 confirmed these provisions. In 1867, in the very midst of persecutions against the Jews, M. Bratiano sent to the prefects a new circular concerning the Israelite communities, prescribing the imposition of a fine on parents who would not send their children to the schools. These were moreover a minority. As soon as the doors had been opened to them, the Jews, aspiring to educate themselves, had rushed in. In 1864, there were in all 20 or 30 in the country’s schools; in 1878-79 they were 11% in the primary schools, and in certain towns 30 and 50% of the total of pupils. In 1882-83, there were 15% in the urban primary schools, and in some localities 30, 40, 50, 70, and even 75% of the total of schoolchildren.
At that time, the tactic changed. The question was raised how one could, before long, reasonably represent as foreigners 260,000 individuals who would know no other language, customs, or manners than Romanian language, customs, and manners. The press began to protest. Formerly it reproached the Jews for their separatist instincts and their voluntary confinement in confessional schools. Henceforth it reproached them for their rapidity in mingling, their desire for knowledge. The teachers, as good civil servants, followed the movement. At their congress of 1883, a delegate declared that the Jews were invading the State schools and that soon there would be no room for Romanians; he urged his colleagues to take measures. They were taken; contrary to the law, the teachers drove Israelite children from the classes, either by claiming that the anticipated number of pupils had been exceeded, or by resorting to mistreatment, or by fomenting antisemitism in the classes and incorporating its doctrine into their teaching.
Parliament corroborated these measures. In 1886-1887, a bill was introduced requiring foreigners to pay a school fee of ten francs per year for primary schools and fifty francs for secondary schools. The law was not voted, but the Minister of Public Education sent (July and August 1887) circulars to primary school directors recommending that they enroll first the Romanians and the naturalized.
He was heeded, and everywhere Jewish children were driven from school; (1) protests, invocation of rights, reminders of former encouragements, all was in vain. The circulars were maintained, and the law of 1893 came to consecrate them. It imposed on foreigners — in practice on the Jews — the payment of a school fee of fifteen francs for rural schools, thirty francs for urban schools, and prescribed that they could be received only to the extent of available places. The law of 1896 corroborated that of 1893. As it was doubtless estimated that it did not sufficiently strike the mass of artisans and the tiniest Jewish traders, already incapable of paying from their meager wages and their mediocre profits the school fees for their numerous children, circulars came to aggravate it. Article 1 of the law stated that documents relating to public education were exempt from stamp duty; the circulars enjoined State agents to subject to stamp duty the documents concerning Jewish children who attended private schools. Furthermore, to halt or at least hinder the petitioning that, if multiplied, could have attracted attention, the payment of stamp duty was required for each signature. Finally, only Romanians were exempted from the examination fee.
(1) In a single town, Botoshani, one hundred and fourteen were expelled.
The result of such measures was not long in coming. In 1891-1892, the proportion of Jews in primary schools was 15 to 16%; it is today 5.5%; it is bound to fall further as the misery of the Jewish population increases — misery that the accumulation of protectionist laws augments every day.
After having thus rendered primary education almost inaccessible, they turned to secondary education, higher education, and then successively to professional schools, commercial schools, and agricultural schools. To eliminate the Jews from the lycees, the same process was followed. They began, from 1890, to exclude them arbitrarily, and the administrative measures were consecrated by the law of March 23/April 14, 1898. It prescribed that children of foreigners were to be admitted to schools of the various levels only “if places remained available after the demands of the sons of Romanians had been satisfied.” In addition, very heavy fees were imposed on them. (1) What was the consequence? In 1896-1897, the Jews formed 11% of pupils in schools and lycees; in 1897-1899, they were no more than 7.5%.
(1) For medical studies, for example, the fee was three hundred and sixty francs per year.
Already the law of April 9/21, 1893, had excluded the Jews from professional schools. In the forestry schools, foreigners were no longer admitted, even as auditors, without the minister’s authorization, always refused to Jews. In the arts and trades schools, foreigners were received only as day students and in the proportion of one-fifth of the available places. In the commercial schools, foreigners were required to pay admission fees. Naturally, in all these establishments, they could compete neither for scholarships nor for subsidies.
The law of 1899 on professional education further strengthened these provisions. In the public schools, professional education was given free of charge; foreigners could henceforth receive it only if Romanians left places available, and even so “their number could not exceed one-fifth of the total number of students.” This had another aim, it is true, than that of intellectually separating the Jew from the Romanian: they wanted to favor the creation of a class of national artisans and to place them in better conditions for daily competition than the Jewish artisans. In the higher schools of forestry and agriculture, only boarding students were to be admitted, scholarship holders of the State, the districts, or the communes, which foreigners could not be. In the lower schools of agriculture, the students admitted were to come from normal primary schools or from elementary agricultural schools where Jews were forbidden to enter. As for the fees, the minister set them at 90 francs for professional schools for boys and girls and for commercial schools of the first degree, and at 150 francs for commercial schools of the second degree.
Was the work thus complete? It was not thought so. Through this legislation, the separation of Romanian and Jew was well obtained, but they wanted more. They feared the superiority of the educated Jew over the Moldo-Wallachian; it was therefore necessary to lower him to render him less dangerous, and to degrade him in order to show that one could not make of him a citizen of ancient Dacia. From the promulgation of the law of 1893, the Jewish communities had founded schools for their children driven from the Romanian school. Obstacles were placed in the way of these foundations, and for this purpose religious persecution was employed. Although adult classes were held on Sundays and holidays in public school establishments, a ministerial circular of October 1899 forbade Jewish schools to open their doors on Sunday, and a circular of April 1900 obliged them to hold classes on Saturday. In February 1900, it was forbidden to teach religion more than one hour every two days and to let the children cover their heads during religious instruction and the reading of Hebrew. In this way, it was hoped to drive away the Orthodox, for whom covering the head during services or the study of the law is a ritual obligation. (1) Since private schools in Romania are of two kinds — those with the State program, entirely subject to school authorities, and those with their own program, more independent — the administrators of the free Jewish schools asked to transform them into schools with their own program. The authorization was refused: “We can grant foreigners,” said Dr. Oncioul, inspector of private education, “the faculty of creating primary schools with their own program… It is not the same for the Jews, who are not citizens but who are not foreigners either.” The government wishes to keep the right to impose its will on Jewish educational institutions and perhaps to modify their programs, in order to maintain the Israelites in an intellectual inferiority profitable to the Romanians. When the valiant descendants of Decebalus have strongly bound their enemy, when they have, moreover, depressed his brain, they will vanquish him more easily. The best means to arrive at this, is it not to place him again under the yoke of the orthodoxy from which he was barely emancipating himself, to shut him up again in his ghetto, to separate him from civilization? This is the conception of those very men who are represented as almost philosemites, of M. Carp, for example. “Every heretic,” he says (1) — these are, in Romania, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Israelites — (2) “shall be required by law to attach himself to a religious community and to pay it a tax on worship. The State shall lend its assistance to the religious communities for the collection of taxes.” (3) For the Catholics or the Protestants, such a law would not be at all dangerous; they would indeed be attached to their communities only for religious life, for they are citizens; the Jews, considered as foreigners, would be subject to them for social life; they would fall again under the tyranny of the rabbis, under the despotism of ritual obligations; one would create for them a clerical organization authorized to appeal to the government to maintain the prescriptions of the faith.
(1) Faced with protests, even from the moderate antisemitic newspapers, the minister had to withdraw his circular, whose anti-confessional character was too blatant.
(1) Neue Freie Presse, January 18, 1901.
(2) Note that, always according to the antisemites, the religious question does not exist in Romania.
(3) This law was in preparation when the Carp ministry fell; it will certainly be taken up again one day.
We have thus shown the two preoccupations that have driven the Romanian government until now in the elaboration of recruitment and education legislation. The first indicated the concern to be able to strike the Jews as foreigners without having to reckon with the serious objection of the military service imposed upon them. This was thought to be satisfied by decreeing that one can pay the blood tax without being a citizen — which is false: one can serve a country of which one is not a citizen, one can serve it freely, but as soon as one serves it obligatorily, it is because one is a member of the city and has its rights. (1)
(1) The Romanian government understands this so well, and that its theory is not defensible, that in 1897 it prepared a bill, which did not succeed, moreover, to exclude the Jews completely from military service.
The second preoccupation was to degrade the Jew; to diminish for him the possibility of participating in modern life; to render him less apt to assimilate; to justify thus the repugnance shown to making him a citizen; and to put him at the same time in less favorable conditions to withstand competition. The eviction from schools answered this concern. But this method was not capable of bringing about a rapid result, and political and economic reasons, linked to each other, demanded that the Jew be placed as soon as possible in the impossibility of doing harm.
The Romanian bourgeoisie — petty and middle — asked its representatives to allow it to develop without fearing formidable adversaries. To satisfy its demands, an entire protectionist system was elaborated. We shall set it forth to complete our picture of the present situation of the Jews in Romania. It comprises a whole series of laws designed to protect the liberal professions, industry, commerce both great and small, and the trades, by gradually excluding the Jews from these various branches of activity. Not that they were designated by name, for a purely antisemitic legislative apparatus would have raised protests, but they were struck as foreigners — foreigners not subject to a foreign protection, that is to say people who can be harassed with impunity, without fearing the representations of consuls, the notes of diplomats, or the interventions of the Powers. This is the characteristic of the Romanian anti-Jewish movement: mendacity and hypocrisy. A people that claims to be cultivated and enlightened, that says it represents Western civilization in the East, (1) that lives on fine phrases — “The Romanian has always been tolerant”; “The Romanian has always been liberal by nature” — such a people owes it to itself not to profess openly a brutal and fanatical antisemitism. The Jew was in the way, but it had been seen in the past that it was dangerous and bad for the good name of Romania to massacre him or drown him in the Danube. It was better, slyly, to multiply before him the obstacles apt to limit and even prevent his expansion; to oblige him to die of hunger or to flee the inhospitable soil. The liberal Bratiano had in this regard imagined an apologue containing the entire Romanian doctrine: “A thin, gaunt, famished fox,” he said, “had managed to pierce a hole to get into a vineyard. Once inside, he fattened up and became plump. (1) But his presence was harmful to the vineyard, in which he was constantly causing damage. Nevertheless, the owner was forbidden to kill him, forbidden also to widen the hole. The clever and cunning vine-grower fenced his vineyard anew and little by little enclosed the fox in an ever-tighter circle, so that it could no longer find anything to fatten on; it lost its strength, became thin, gaunt again, and finally escaped through the hole it had itself opened.” This parable stated a fact (2) and traced a program. It was followed. The tumultuous and imprudent period of antisemitism seemed closed, and if recently, by the very force of events, it seemed to reopen, it was through the impatience of a few hotheads, a few young people not yet trained in political cunning, and the government strove to stop the disturbances. It rightly estimated that the legislative work sufficed, since it struck all categories, and that soon, on the soil of Moldavia and Wallachia, the Jew could exercise neither a function, nor a profession, nor an art, nor a trade.
(1) “Romania is the Belgium of the East,” says the Romanian.
(1) Four-fifths of the Romanian Jews are artisans, without work, or paupers living on public charity.
(2) It was in 1882 that M. Bratiano imagined this apologue.
These so-called usurers, fit only for usury, were in fact represented in all the professions, and one had to work actively to dislodge them. This was done methodically. According to the law of December 4, 1864, only Romanians or those naturalized as Romanians could practice the profession of lawyer; however, the Jews were tolerated as defenders before the justices of the peace. The law of June 8, 1884, put an end to this tolerance. It still authorized them to be secretaries of lawyers or to have notarial offices, but successively, by decisions of the bar council, these authorizations were taken from them, and henceforth they are not even admitted to represent, before the conciliation courts, Romanian owners or tenants. It was lawful for them to practice medicine and to enter the sanitary service; a law, that of June 14, 1893, came to remove this license. “In order to be appointed to any post in the sanitary service,” it stated, “one must be a Romanian citizen and have served in the army.” The districts and villages had the right, in default of Romanians, to engage foreigners, if the latter accepted a contract stipulating that as soon as a Romanian citizen presented himself to request the position, it would be given to him immediately, without the occupant being able to claim any indemnity. A percentage was even withheld from the Jew during the time he was in office for retirement benefits, although he had no right to them. The doctor thus ousted did not have the recourse of becoming a pharmacist, the law of 1893 granting only to Romanians and the naturalized the right to be owners or managers of a pharmacy, and the foreigner holding a pharmacist’s diploma being permitted only to be an assistant manager or assistant director. As for public functions, the Jews have no access to them. They cannot enter the railways since the State bought them back. Nor can they obtain a position in the tobacco administration. The law of 1872 and that of 1879 on the monopoly, supplemented by the provisions of 1881 and 1887, require in effect that the officials of the excise be Romanian: employees, contractors, or simple retailers.
Too many careers remained open, however, careers in which the Romanian bourgeois feared Jewish activity; they had to be closed, or first made difficult, by diminishing the rights of those who entered them and by favoring the natives. The law of June 1, 1881, targeted stockbrokers and commodity brokers. One could henceforth be admitted to the guild only if one were a Romanian or naturalized; the same qualification was required of the agents and brokers’ representatives and those in their service. The law was immediately applicable, except in the ports, where it was applicable only three years after promulgation, for there were Christian foreigners there who could have enforced their rights. Romanian bankers and merchants who were also harmed protested, pointing out the increase and variability of the brokerage fees demanded by Romanian agents and brokers, who, having eliminated their competitors, could impose their tariffs: it was too late. A law of June 24, 1886, even aggravated the prohibitions, by forbidding non-Romanians the practice of the trades of brokers in cereals and in wines at fairs and markets. To satisfy the voters, a corps of dragomans was created, ignorant of the grain and beverage trade, a privileged and national body that harshly exploited the eternal exploited in Romania — the peasant — who was forbidden to take foreign agents. Jewish brokers exercising the trade of intermediaries were even prosecuted on a private basis between buyers and sellers of grain in towns where there were no commodity exchanges. The ruined brokers were further prevented from being customs agents and forwarders, the law of 1882 requiring for the exercise of this function the minister’s approval. At first it had been intended to give authorization only to those registered as voters; but faced with protests from the diplomatic agents, they contented themselves with ministerial assent, pitilessly refused to the Jews.
The circle tightened further. The law of June 16, 1886, and the regulation of October 27, 1893, forbade any non-Romanian individual from being a druggist or a grocer selling toxic substances necessary for industry. The laws of April 28, 1887, and April 21, 1889, refused them the right to participate in the bidding for the leasing of communal revenues; tenants were forbidden to take them into their service to collect these revenues. As for public auctions, if the law does not permit the exclusion of Jews, ministerial arbitrariness supplies it by stipulating in the auction notices that only Romanians and naturalized citizens may take part.
For simple merchants, who could not be directly reached, obstacles were placed in their way. Although Jews and foreigners formed the immense majority, they were refused admission to the chambers of commerce and industry, and the law of March 1, 1886, required that those who would elect their members “pay a license of the first, second, third, or fourth class and enjoy civil and political rights.” Thus, non-Romanians could not discuss the interests of their guild. The law of May 10, 1887, on limited partnerships and joint-stock companies restricted their rights to administer their own moneys. It required that the sole administrator or the majority plus one of the administrators of these companies be Romanian; likewise for the auditors and alternates. Foreign capital, Jewish capital, was placed under guardianship.
However draconian, however arbitrary this commercial legislation was, it did not reduce to misery those it affected, for they belonged to a well-off social category whose action was hindered but not stopped. It was not the same when the small trader was touched, and he was touched by the law on itinerant commerce, whose aim was, said the explanatory statement, to encourage stable commerce, or rather to favor and protect the voter. It had been prepared for a long time; for a long time the police, by virtue of prefectoral orders, had been hunting down Jewish peddlers in the streets of the cities, and it was under the pretext of remedying the disorders provoked by the execution of these illegal orders that the government introduced a law, promulgated on March 17, 1884, after having aroused violent discussions in the Chamber and the Senate, and despite the desperate petitions of those affected. (1) Article 1 ordered:
“Itinerant commerce of all kinds is entirely prohibited in urban communes and throughout the extent of their districts, except in cases expressly provided for by the present law.”
Article 2. — “Is considered itinerant commerce any sale from house to house, from place to place, in open places, in shacks, stalls, or boards set up at markets, streets, dead ends, courtyards, corridors, carriage gates, or other entrances.”
(1) The petition of the Jewish peddlers of Bucharest stated: “Itinerant commerce, free and authorized from time immemorial in Romania, has never been prohibited; it is on the faith of this liberty that we have practiced it to this day. Many of us could not even find another livelihood. The widow who does not know how to feed her children, the lame, the one-armed, and the old man who cannot earn their living any other way, and so many others in a similar position, will all lose their bread if this law is to be voted. In other countries where industry is flourishing, if peddling is restricted, little by little and imperceptibly, the men who practice it can employ their arms elsewhere, while in our country, where factories have not yet taken off, to vote such a law is to throw twenty thousand souls onto the pavement, for we cannot find other means of existence. We have no capital; our only fortune is the bundle or the trunk we carry, and very often we owe them only to benevolent merchants who trust us and honor us with their credit. Here, in the capital, we are four hundred families, men, women, and children. We will be without bread tomorrow if you, gentlemen senators, do not take pity on us and if you do not set aside this disastrous bill. And it is not only we, the four hundred families — it is the five thousand families scattered over the entire surface of the country that will be left without resources.” The Senate referred the petition to the committee that had been seized of the bill, and it took no account of it, any more than of those that might subsequently be sent.
Article 7 allowed itinerant commerce in rural communes and at fairs where the small urban trader did not go. Article 6 authorized the itinerant commerce of agricultural products, forestry products, gardening products, and household industry, without it being necessary to ask for authorization.
The law having been voted, a ministerial circular of May 2, 1884, ordered its rigorous and immediate application; the peddlers asked the king for a six-month reprieve; it was not granted them. The commissioners and agents organized the hunt (1) for peddlers; they were not content to execute the law, they added to it. It did not target Jewish secondhand dealers; they were apprehended. It authorized the sale of agricultural products, etc.; it was prevented. They even opposed the sale of fruit in the streets, while closing their eyes to Christian peddlers, native or foreign, and letting them freely traffic in their wares. More than 20,000 Israelites (2) were reduced to beggary, and then they were hunted as vagabonds; several perished of starvation, died in the open street or in their hovels. The Romanian antisemites had won a great victory over the Jewish exploiters. Moreover, the entire nationalist legislation brought similar triumphs — not over the few wealthy ones (those, the Romanian government borrowed money from) but over the proletarians.
(1) “I must confess,” wrote the deputy Panou in the journal l’Amaradia (August 10, 1884), “that the law on itinerant commerce is being applied abusively. Under pretext of itinerant commerce, poor innocent people are often arrested, they are sequestered in the police stations until their file is drawn up, as if it were a case of flagrante delicto; they are then led under escort before the justice of the peace: he condemns them on the spot, and it is always on the spot that he converts the fine into imprisonment, without even inquiring whether they can pay it.”
(2) “I estimate that the number of twenty thousand is below the truth,” M. Poni had said to the Senate during the discussion of the law.
Workers are, in fact, affected by all the restrictive measures, either directly or indirectly. After the law on the tobacco monopoly, the elimination of Jewish workers, both male and female, from the factories was ordered (they were all Jewish in Moldavia), and if it was carried out progressively, it was because Romanian personnel was lacking. In Jassy, for example, the Israelite cigarette-makers not yet dismissed went on strike; they were compelled, by force, to return to the workshops, pending their expulsion. After the law on peddling, saddlers, shoemakers, and other artisans were forbidden to sell, elsewhere than in shops, the articles they made themselves. They were also affected by the law for the encouragement of industry (of May 24, 1885), which granted privileges to whoever wished to create in Romania “an industrial establishment with a capital of at least fifty thousand francs or requiring the daily employment of at least twenty-five workers.” The law could not exclude foreign or Jewish capitalists from the advantages conferred, for that would have been to go against the aim pursued, but it stipulated that “five years after the founding of a factory, two-thirds of the workers were to be Romanian.”
Likewise, according to the law on railway concessions, obliging the concessionaire to employ 60% Romanian employees, metalwork was given out as a government-managed enterprise rather than put out for bids, in order to be able to exclude Jewish workers through the contracts. During the construction of the electric tramways of Jassy, foreign workers were recruited — there were no Romanian ones, the work seeming too arduous — so as not to engage the Jewish workers who presented themselves. The municipality of Bucharest instructed the road service administration not to employ them. In 1899, the Minister of Public Works, M. Istrati, had the railway administration drive out the switchmen, the carters, the customs porters, the workers from the construction sites; he forbade giving Jews the painting work in the stations, and since there were no Romanian painting workers in Moldavia, some were brought from Wallachia, and others were improvised.
However, as of now, no direct legislation has yet been passed against the Jewish proletariat, but attempts have already been made. As early as 1882, an unsuccessful effort was made to pass a law requiring that only those who produced a certificate obtained from a professional school — where only Romanians could enter — be admitted to the practice of a trade. Later another bill was introduced: the initiators demanded that a license of free practice be required of those who wished to exercise the professions of engineer, architect, contractor, builder, as well as the related trades (masons, stonecutters, tinsmiths, carpenters, etc.); it was not even discussed. Others are currently being presented, notably that of M. Filipesco, Minister of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture in the conservative cabinet of M. Carp, whose aim is to reorganize the corporate system. It classifies trades as: regulated trades, authorized trades, and free trades, and subordinates their practice to obtaining either the license of free practice or a corporate registration, granted and delivered in such a way that foreigners and Jews cannot claim them. The adoption of such legislation is now the avowed aim of the Moldavian antisemites; they will spare nothing to achieve it, (1) and it does not seem doubtful that they will succeed. While waiting to be able to effectively protect national labor, the law is placed at the service of Romanian capitalism. The police make themselves the auxiliaries of the employers. They threaten with expulsion, by virtue of the law on foreigners, Jewish proletarians who refuse the wage offered; under the same threat, they compel them to replace Christian workers who have gone on strike, or who do not wish to accept the wages refused by Romanian workers. And it is a marvel to see, under such conditions, class solidarity persisting; one does see it, however, as at Galatz for example where the Jewish bakers preferred to let themselves be expelled rather than take the place of the striking Orthodox bakers. They are also prevented from defending their rights. If they belong to workers’ groups, they are driven out, likewise if they attend meetings where proletarian demands are discussed, (2) and above all if they engage in socialist agitation. They are hunted as vagabonds, using the regulation on residence permits (1); they are not allowed to settle in the villages, because of the law on rural police and on communal organization; thus they cannot participate in agricultural work, which attracts every year forty to fifty thousand foreign workers.
(1) Workers’ organizations have already been mobilized, so-called Romanian workers who demonstrated in the streets of Bucharest and asked Parliament to take measures to protect national labor. (Le Temps, January 25, 1902)
(2) In Braila in 1896, workers; in Bucharest, Jewish employees who attended the meeting in favor of the bill on Sunday rest.
(1) 500 driven from Bucharest in 1887.
These laws or regulations have brought worker misery to its peak, at the same time as they have paralyzed the Jews in their defense. The first, the law on foreigners, was drafted as follows:
Article 1. — “The foreigner who has his domicile or residence in Romania and who, by his conduct during his stay in the country, shall compromise the internal or external security of the State, or disturb the public peace, or take part in activities aimed at the overthrow of the political or social order in the country or abroad, may be compelled by the government to leave the place where he is, or to reside in a specially designated place, or else to leave the country.”
Article 2. — “The ministerial decision of expulsion, taken by the council of ministers, or that by which a foreigner is obliged to reside in a determined place or to leave his present residence, shall be notified to the interested party through administrative channels and shall not be motivated.”
Article 6. — “The foreigner recently arrived in the country, who shall not have a known domicile or residence, shall be required, within ten days after his arrival and after the promulgation of the present law, to obtain from the police or local administrative authority a free residence permit for the time he indicates he wishes to stay or travel in the country.”
This law, voted on April 6, 1881, was originally directed against the Russian nihilists. It allowed liberal Romania to close its doors to them and to deliver to the tsar those who had already taken refuge there. It was after the persecutions of 1885 against the Jews, after the efforts of English Israelites with Lord Salisbury to ask him to intervene and to demand the execution of the Treaty of Berlin, that the Romanian government thought of applying it to the Jews. Nine persons were expelled — journalists who had protested by their writings against the persecutions or administrators of newspapers that had published the articles. These Jews had committed a crime of lese-patrie by not accepting in silence the measures by which they were struck in a country that refused them not only the rights of citizens but also the rights of men. The Romanian press, although antisemitic, thought it necessary to protest; the protest was ignored, and henceforth expulsions were carried out systematically. Jews born in Romania, being placed under no foreign protection, could be conducted beyond the frontiers by administrative order, without the reasons for their expulsion being given. They were said to be threatening the internal or external security of the State. How? By protesting against the situation imposed on them, the legislation that crushes them; by recommending or organizing emigration. For one does not have the right to make the Jew emigrate en masse before the Romanians are able to replace these useful hands, which will not be possible for some time yet.
The regulation on free residence permits, supplemented in October 1881, made the law more rigorous. It required that “every foreigner, traveling or residing in Romania, take a free residence permit.” Only “the district prefects and, in Bucharest and Jassy, the prefects of police” had the right to issue these permits, required except for travelers whose stay did not exceed one month, in exchange for their passport. Travel to fairs and rural communes without a free residence permit was prohibited; it was treated as a violation of the regulation, and the foreigner was considered as lacking a “travel document.” The consulates and embassies filed complaints, and to satisfy them the Romanian cabinet announced that it would modify the regulation. It did nothing of the sort, but it did not apply it to foreigners. Only the Jews were its victims. Already, moreover, since 1880, they had been compelled to take free residence and identification permits when they came to fairs; henceforth, these permits were demanded of Jews living in the cities and trading there. Passports were refused to Israelite merchants who went abroad for their business.
In 1889, there was a certain respite in the arbitrary treatment, but the vexations resumed in 1891 and lasted until 1896. In 1900, a new regulation intervened; it differed little from the preceding one, but the Minister of the Interior, M. Olanesco, accompanied it with a circular specifying that it was applicable to foreigners but not to “autochthonous” Jews. This was in reality to place the fate of the Jew in the hands of the police, who considered him, or not, autochthonous at their pleasure. Moreover, another circular was immediately issued recommending that Jews who were not foreign subjects procure identification permits. From then on, certain prefects issued them with difficulty, finding birth certificates, lottery certificates, and even documents establishing that the applicants had satisfied military service to be insufficient. Other prefects, on the contrary, summoned the Jews to procure these identification permits, under penalty of being treated as foreigners.
This coercive apparatus may appear perfect; it is not in the eyes of the Romanian government. To complete it, M. Aurelian, Minister of the Interior, has just introduced a new bill on rural police, designed under an apparent liberalism to strike once more at the small traders, the minor trades, and the workers. According to this bill, foreigners would be required to make an application to the mayor’s office of the rural commune where they wish to settle. The communal council would be free to grant or refuse them the authorization to settle. The authorization would have to be approved by the Minister of the Interior, after the opinion of the prefect. In case of refusal, the interested parties could appeal to the same minister, who would decide, always after the opinion of the prefect. Those who did not fulfill these formalities could be expelled, as could those who “by acts, words, or writings shall threaten the general security of the State, disturb order or public tranquility, or commit an infraction of the laws, even in the case where their establishment shall have been expressly authorized.” Thus, if a foreigner does not conform to the law, even through ignorance, he will not be brought before a tribunal; he will be expelled administratively, ruined without any form of trial, by the will of the police, sovereign in this case to interpret infractions of the laws. The Jew can thus be easily expelled. But three articles of this provident law prevent him beforehand from coming to settle in a rural commune. Article 40 states: “No public establishment, tavern, inn, grocery, cafe, bakery, etc., may be opened without the authorization of the communal council and the approval of the prefect.” And Article 44: “Only Romanians and the naturalized may obtain authorization to open a public establishment.” To arrive at considering the small retailer, the tiny grocer, the small hardware dealer, the baker, as a sort of civil servant assigned to the management of public establishments — this is the masterpiece of Romanian protectionism. Another article affects, indirectly but very effectively — for it brings employer interest into play — the Jewish worker; this is Article 18, drafted as follows: “Persons who employ foreign workers must make a declaration by which they undertake: to pay the fiscal, departmental, and municipal taxes owed by foreign workers during their stay in the country; to assume responsibility for any damage caused to the commune or its inhabitants by foreign workers; to pay all costs of repatriation of these foreigners.”
If this law is voted, it will finish making life in the countryside impossible for the Jews; it will be the crowning achievement of the long effort made for thirty years by the antisemites to drive them back into the cities. The beginning was, before the Treaty of Berlin, the law of 1873 on beverages, stating that the managers of drinking establishments located in rural communes, villages, and hamlets “must, in order to obtain the license, be inscribed as voters on the lists of a commune”; the same was required of those who wished to keep isolated inns situated on the roads.
In 1880, a circular recalled the governmental agents to the strict execution of the law of 1873, which had not been sufficiently severely applied. A month was granted to Jewish tavernkeepers to sell their stock and close their establishments. Another circular, of 1881, extended these prescriptions to small towns, market towns, and rural settlements, and even opposed the wholesale sale by foreigners. At that time, lofty moral considerations were still put forward: it was a matter of tearing the peasant from the Israelite poisoners. Since 1881, no Jew has sold alcohol to the Romanian people. (1) The tavernkeepers are now the mayors, the notaries, the communal functionaries, even the sub-prefects, and some foreigners whose Christianity has been duly established. The peasant is poisoned nationally, and he is more so than ever, since adulteration is practiced more cynically than before, and the new operators of the drinking establishments oblige, by virtue of their official functions and thanks to the authority at their disposal, their clients to consume more, which the Jew could never have done.
(1) Except in communes where no Orthodox tavernkeepers could be found.
In 1898, in the Romanian Chamber, (1) a deputy interpellated, but his protest was in vain, for behind the tavernkeepers stood big Romanian capitalists. This law thus effected a first pushing back of the Jews. The communal law of 1887 made it possible to push them back more effectively. It did not forbid them to dwell in the villages — that would have been a retrograde measure that the sensitivity of the Romanian liberals would not have allowed — but it said (Article 2): “The foreigner who comes to settle in a rural commune must obtain the authorization of the communal council.” In addition, it left standing the law of 1869 on rural police, whose Article 10 stipulated: “Individuals without known means may not settle in rural communes without the authorization of the communal council.” The authorities considered the Jews as “individuals without known means,” just as they regarded them as foreigners; they were therefore expelled from the villages, as well as from the small towns and settlements ruralized by circulars after the vote of the law on beverages. “It is a poignant and painful chapter to write,” says M. Sincerus (2) speaking of these expulsions; “and therefore it must be written in all its details, in all its horrors; to summarize it is to expose oneself not only to a denial by the Romanians, who have always denied the mass expulsions and the heartrending and desolating scenes they provoked, but also to the incredulity of persons well-disposed toward Judaism, who would believe in a calculated and deliberate exaggeration to arouse the world’s pity for the fate of people whom the Romanian authorities treat as vagabonds and accuse of corrupting the rural population. One witnesses scenes from another age, a revolting arbitrariness. It is only by citing the names of the expelled persons, their past, by supporting each case with documents and proofs, which abound, it is only by following the atrocious scenes step by step, in the form of a chronicle and only in this form, that one could really give an idea of what the hunt for Jews in the countryside means. To generalize these facts, to extract the substance, to make a summary statement and present it to the public, would be to produce a work that could be treated as fantasy and to which neither attention nor credence would be given, so much would the truth seem implausible.” This reached such a point that the most antisemitic ministers intervened to stop the prefects and the communal authorities. It is true that, on the other hand, they constantly armed them with new circulars whose interpretation was left to their fancy, or whose contradictory injunctions allowed every liberty in application.
(1) Sessions of March 7 and 11, 1898.
(2) E. Sincerus, The Jews in Romania, pages 178-179.
In 1892, the conservative Catargi ministry took a decision according to which the law on rural police and the communal law were not applicable “to foreigners of all categories having properties in the small towns of the country since their founding or since a distant epoch.” Foreigners who had completed a legal term in the army were likewise authorized to settle “in the villages and settlements where they had been recruited.” (1) Those who came temporarily with their wives and children during the period of agricultural work were also tolerated — when one could not do without their help — but only for the duration of their engagement. In 1896, the liberal Stoloyan cabinet abrogated this decision as not concordant with the categorical provisions of the law on rural police and the communal law. A circular, which followed this abrogation, declared that “the authorizations given at a certain time to foreigners by the rural communal councils to settle in the communes, however old they might be, can always be revoked by the communal council as soon as the foreigner becomes dangerous to the public peace, or disturbs the order, or falls into indigence, or lacks means of subsistence.”
(1) Most of these settlements had been founded or populated in the eighteenth century by Jews, summoned to the desert territory by the boyars, who conferred upon them privileges that the reigning princes confirmed by chrysobulls. They enjoyed, for example, the right of property and the advantages of citizens. When the settlements were transformed into rural communes, these privileges were taken from the Jews, except the right to possess properties that they could transmit by succession but not sell.
After the great emigration of 1900, and in the hope of putting an end to it, for it was becoming dangerous for the economic prosperity of the country, the Carp ministry implicitly abrogated the circular of 1896. But the circular of abrogation was drafted in so vague a fashion that the prefects used it as a pretext to tell the Jews who had already been expelled and wished to return to the communes that they had instructions not to expel, and not to authorize foreigners to settle anew. After the fall of the ministry, as before, the authorities blamed the communal councils that did not expel the Jews, whom they needed as workers.
I have just set forth the laws, shown the arsenal that they are, not only in themselves, but in the way the police and the administration interpret them. One was still able to add illegal vexations, without the public or the government appearing to be disturbed by them. The communes, incited by the authorities, certain of impunity, have legislated financially, imposing on the Jews special taxes and capitation fees, as in the Middle Ages. In 1880, the census commission of Buzeu imposed on Jewish taxpayers a tax denominated the Israelite tax. In 1882, in Piatra, the Jewish community was obliged to pay the municipality 1,200 francs per year for the maintenance of the town band. In 1881, in Dorohoi, the communal council established a tax on the poultry that the Jews have ritually slaughtered by the sacrificer, and the proceeds were allocated by the council to the construction of a cathedral. In 1891, the same council obtained from the government the authorization to organize a lottery guaranteed by this tax, and the Jews were required to buy tickets. (1) Coercive means were used for this if necessary, and the civil registrar went so far as to oppose the burial of Jews whose family had not bought tickets. The tax struck even those Israelites who had no recourse to the sacrificer. In 1895, this council devised a new tax on meat, levied exclusively on the Jews. In the market town of Bivolari, the sub-prefect had the Jews pay four thousand francs per year to remunerate police agents charged with hunting them down. (1) And not only is the Jew at the mercy of communal whims, but he is also at the mercy of the administration, of justice, of the police, of the politicians; he is subject to taxes and forced labor at will; he is the taxable commodity, indefinitely exploitable. If he wishes to be left in peace, he must constantly ransom himself; otherwise expulsion threatens him, and if he does not capitulate, it is pronounced against him. If he is rich, he submits; if he is poor, he endures. The administration, short of money, threatens the Jews of the commune or district with expulsion unless they consent to pay it a fee. (2) Politicians without resources, and ministry employees, use the same methods to have credit opened for them at Jewish banks, and those same bankers are admonished if they grant facilities to the government’s adversaries. In Calarash, a Jewish tailor is expelled for not having delivered the clothes of the police chief, who was his debtor. (1) Another Israelite is expelled for having dared to demand damages and interest because he had been extradited against all right and delivered to the German police. (2)
(1) These taxes are absolutely illegal and contrary to the Constitution, although the government tolerates and authorizes them. According to the Constitution, Article 10: “There exists in the State no distinction of class. All Romanians are equal before the law and required to contribute indiscriminately to taxes and public charges.” Article 11: “Foreigners enjoy, with regard to persons and property, the same protection as Romanians.” Article 108: “Every tax is established only for the benefit of the State, the district, or the commune.” Article 109: “No tax for the benefit of the State may be established or collected except by virtue of a law.” Article 110: “No charge, no imposition for the benefit of the district may be established except with the consent of the district council. No charge, no communal imposition may be established except with the consent of the communal council. Taxes voted by departmental and communal councils must obtain the confirmation of the legislative power and the sanction of the king.”
(2) In the Dobrudja, for example, in October 1890.
(1) Adverul, October 15, 1899.
(2) Frankfurter Zeitung, July 1897.
As for the residence permits that the law demands, the police sell them publicly; too bad for the poor wretches who cannot buy them: they are treated as vagabonds. And these resources do not dry up, since the communes constantly recall the Jews, whom they cannot do without, for the Jew is the indispensable mason, carpenter, wheelwright, roofer, and the Jew constantly returns, for he is dying of hunger and misery, and a stay, even temporary, in the village is a respite from his distress. He returns, and again feeds the policeman until the day when he is once more driven out. And so it has been for twenty years; for twenty years the constant tide of the expelled and the recalled has ebbed and flowed on the roads of Moldavia and Wallachia.
No one is moved by these sufferings, and who could be? The peasant is bowed under the yoke; he is no less subject to taxes than the Jew, for whom he feels no hatred, who is for him a brother in misery, but he has no more sensitivity for the misfortune of others than for his own. As for the ruling class, that of the civil servants and politicians, it can maintain itself only by perpetually sacrificing the Jew to its bourgeois clientele, which has more appetites than it can satisfy. The irrational horror of the Jew allows everything to be accepted, and in a still half-barbarous people like the Romanian people, which under a superficial veneer of civilization has a bedrock of Oriental cruelty, the idea of the existence of a category of pariahs on whom everyone can strike is accepted without difficulty. To a Bucharest printer who comes to protest against the arrest of one of his relatives, the prefect of police replies: “For you Jews, the police know no laws.” Another prefect obliges the Jews to paint their stairs and doors red and has those who resist beaten by his policemen. Another requisitions Jews to transport military equipment for free, and the club makes them march. (1) Against these abuses, no recourse to justice, except for the rich man who can buy it; the poor man, mistreated, will have to consider himself fortunate to still be alive. After the riots of 1897 in Bucharest, a Jew, blinded by the rioters, comes as a witness before the tribunal. “Can you not recognize those who struck you?” asks the judge amid the laughter of the audience. To teach the Israelites a lesson, the pillagers, the murderers, the arsonists, the profaners of cemeteries, the demolishers of synagogues, the drowners of Jews, are either not prosecuted or acquitted to the applause of the crowd.
(1) In 1885, a journalist enumerated in the journal Fraternitatea numerous cases of brutalities, even murders, perpetrated upon the Jews. They did not wish to prosecute him — he would have brought evidence. They preferred to expel him, although he was born in Romania, of a father born in Romania. This was a lesson for the others, and this is how Jewish writers are muzzled in Romania.
And everything contributes to maintaining, even developing this state of mind: the school, the press, the antisemitic organizations. In certain classes, Israelite pupils are placed on separate benches, and the teacher gives the signal for mockery and abuse. Anti-Jewish essay topics are proposed, which appear in the classic works, in the Romanian language grammars intended for the secondary schools. Jewish children are obliged to write on them. Here are some: “One must not give credence to the words of a Jew, even when he is on his deathbed.” — “In almost all the villages of Moldavia, the taverns are kept by Jews who, like leeches, drive the peasants to drunkenness” — and alongside this one, mendacious, since, since the law on licenses, taverns are operated exclusively by Christians, this other contradictory one: “Our laws forbid Jews from being tavernkeepers in the villages.” (1) To this must be added the insults that depress the child’s soul, that debase him in the eyes of his classmates: “Move away,” a teacher says to an Israelite student, “I cannot bear the smell of the Jew.” — “You are late,” says another; “your father must have been practicing usury so that you could bring your fee.” The spirit animating the newspapers is worse still: with rare exceptions, (1) the entire press is antisemitic and, in polemics, triumphs in the brutal tone that is that of the jingoes and the anti-Jews, of which I need not give examples. The organ of the politicians, it pushes for restrictive laws, and if it does not suffice for this task, the antisemitic organizations come to its aid. The most powerful is the Antisemitic Alliance, of which M. Istrati, who has been Minister of Public Education, was a member. Founded in 1895 in Bucharest, it includes a considerable number of politicians and civil servants, and according to its statutes, its object is:
(1) Romanian language grammar, by M. T. Suchianou, professor of Romanian language at the Saint-Sava and Saint-Georges lyceum, Bucharest, fourth edition, 1898, pages 28, 72, and 239.
(1) The Adverul, of M. Mille, deputy, for example.
Chapter I, Section 2. — a) The struggle by all permitted means and in every direction for the preservation of the Romanian element against the Jewish element, whose number and vices have become a danger to the Romanian nation;
b) The protection and development of a Romanian industry in the hands of Romanians;
c) The encouragement and development of Romanian commerce by Romanians and the diminution of the financial influence that the Jews have acquired;
d) The struggle against Jewish usury and speculation in all branches of agriculture, principally in Moldavia;
e) The safeguarding and development of the religious sentiment, the struggle against the corrupting action of the Jews and against the demoralization caused by a bad interpretation of humanitarian services;
f) The encouragement and protection of Romanian workers;
g) Since the Jewish element is not assimilable, the Alliance will fight against the increase of political rights that one might wish to accord to the Jews;
h) It will use all permitted means that may contribute to making the situation of the Jews in Romania impossible and to favoring their emigration from the country.
Chapter II, Section 8: The Alliance will inaugurate an agrarian policy that will protect the landowners and the agriculturists against Jewish exploitation.
To clearly mark its economic-religious character, the Alliance inscribes in its statutes:
Chapter VI, Section 70: Every Romanian who makes a gift of one hundred to five hundred francs shall have the right to wear the insignia of the order of the “Cavaler Antisemit” (Antisemitic Knight).
Section 71: He who makes a gift of five hundred to one thousand francs shall have the right to wear the insignia of the order of Saint Michael, the patron of the Alliance.
Section 72: One year after his admission, each member shall receive a diploma of antisemite.
Section 73: All members who possess the diploma of antisemite and who shall have distinguished themselves in the mission entrusted to them by the Alliance may obtain the order of the Cross.
Section 74: Members who have the order of the Cross may obtain the order of the “Cavaler Antisemit” and that of Saint Michael, if they are found worthy by a vote of the grand council, for services rendered to the Alliance.
Section 84: The Alliance will work in relations and in agreement with the antisemitic alliances abroad.
As everywhere else, as in Austria, as in Germany, as in France, the antisemites in Romania place their economic program under the protection of the Cross, of Christ, and of the archangels. In reality, they do not separate their commercial and industrial interests from their religious prejudices, and they use the latter to preserve the former. Their militia, thus organized, wished to play an active role. It did not confine itself to exercising through its members an influence in Parliament; it contributed to organizing riots when they appeared necessary: at Bacau, at Botoshani in 1890, at Bucharest in 1897, at Jassy in 1898, at Dranceni in 1900. The disturbances in Bucharest were the most serious and the most characteristic. They broke out following the bill whose purpose was to exclude the Jews from the army, (1) whose introduction had provoked keen agitation among those affected. They knew that this law, if voted, would give a new weapon to those who wished to deny them the rights of citizens. The Jewish reservists held a meeting to protest. This meeting was followed by another, provoked by the Orthodox students. The day before, the organizers, or those who supported them, had posted on the walls of the capital a violent manifesto, and the next day, at the close of the meeting, bands roamed the streets, sacking the homes of the Jews, smashing the windows of their shops, pillaging their stores and the cafes frequented by them, devastating the synagogues, assailing isolated Israelites and mistreating them. The rioters were armed with clubs and iron bars; they operated with the benevolent neutrality of the police. It was only at the end of the day that the gendarmerie intervened and stopped the disorders. (1) In the Chamber, on an interpellation by M. Marghiloman, the Minister of the Interior covered his police, shifted the responsibility for the excesses onto the Jews, and declared that they were “a regrettable reaction against their presumption.” It was, indeed, the Jews who had to pay the costs of the war: they were forbidden to hold meetings, even private ones, (2) and their societies were dissolved.
(1) Introduced by General Berendei, Minister of War, this bill exempted the Jews from military service and imposed a tax on them in exchange for this exemption. It was not voted.
(1) At this point, the General Association of Romanian Students thought it necessary to protest against the organizers of the disturbances and against the minority of students who had cooperated with the antisemitic gangs.
(2) It was even forbidden for members of the community to meet to deliberate on the needs of worship.
What could they do henceforth to defend themselves? They were not recognized as having the right of petition; this belonged only to citizens, and by virtue of this principle the petition of the General Association of Indigenous Jews, composed exclusively of persons who had done their regular military service, was, in April 1893, rejected by the Senate. They were now denied the right to meet, to associate, for any purpose whatsoever. Ruined by the expulsions from the villages, by the multiplied prohibitions, by the rigorous application of the laws of exception, by police vexations, they had nothing left but emigration. In 1872, in 1887, they had begun to leave this hostile soil. The government, alarmed, calmed the ardor of its civil servants. If too many Jews emigrated, Romania would be ruined. In 1889, the emigration movement resumed; committees even formed: the Antisemitic Alliance could rejoice at seeing its aim attained. Until the end of May 1900, in a few months, 5,411 Romanian Jews disembarked at New York, 1,000 in Anatolia, 1,500 at Constantinople, 300 in Cyprus. A thousand headed for Paris, as many for London; others spread through Central Europe, and the movement continued. “The emigration,” wrote the journal la Roumanie (an official organ), “is taking considerable, in certain respects alarming proportions”; it “concerns the Israelite working class, which is useful and even indispensable to us, since the Romanian does not wish to practice certain trades.” Some small towns were almost depopulated; in others, a large number of houses were abandoned; the rental value of buildings declined, and this decline provoked a fall in the shares of the Mortgage Bank. The government was panic-stricken. If it feared the impression that the sight of these wretches driven by hunger might produce in Europe, it was also worried about the formidable economic consequences that mass emigration would have. On the one hand, it had it declared that Jewish misery was caused by the bad harvest. Although this was only a secondary factor, which would not have provoked such intense misery had it not already preexisted, it compelled the Jews, even by threats, to sign declarations acknowledging that it was not persecutions that were ruining them. The prefect of police of Bucharest even succeeded in compelling a man without will or character, the rabbi of the community, whose cowardice provoked the indignation and protests of the Israelites.
On the other hand, the governmental agents received orders to stop the emigrants by all means. The leaders of groups were threatened; the organizers of emigration committees were expelled. They had to remain on Romanian soil: the thin fox of which M. Bratiano had spoken was not free to flee. Moreover, the frontiers closed before the fleeing Jews; the Austrian and Hungarian authorities pushed them back; they were free only to die on Romanian soil. Their distress had reached its peak; it seemed they could descend no further, and they lived for long months only on the aid of European Jewish charity, for local charity was insufficient. Out of a population of 269,000 souls, nearly a hundred thousand were in the most complete destitution. Some perished in abominable hovels; others, driven even from these shelters whose rent they could no longer pay, camped in the open air, in the fields, in the courtyards of synagogues, in cemeteries, or wandered in groups along the roads. To these specific causes of misery — legal persecution, expulsions from villages and the countryside, exclusion from employment and all public works, the prohibition on certain contractors from employing more than one-third foreign workers, the ban on owning rural land or buildings, the obstacles placed in the way of practicing trades and itinerant commerce, the denial of access to schools, the systematic degradation obtained through imposed ignorance, the vexations, the persecutions surreptitious or brutal — to these particular causes was added a general one: the poor economic situation of Romania, its credit shaken, bankruptcy threatening, the deplorable harvests. In the past, the Jews had weathered similar years, for living conditions were still acceptable for them; they were so no longer, for they no longer possessed the means of resistance.
Since that year of the great exodus (1900), the situation has not changed; a slow emigration has continued, it continues still, but it cannot be a solution, the mass of those who emigrate not being sufficient to remedy the congestion produced by so considerable a number of the workless. Momentarily, there has been some relief. In some towns, the Jewish workers remained in smaller numbers, and the departures not having been replaced by Christian workers, they saw their wages rise. The houses having emptied, a 33% drop occurred in rents; the frightened owners sought to retain their tenants, and public sentiment, in some places, improved under the influence of interests. The Jews breathed for a moment. But the Romanian politicians have not abandoned their work; we have shown this by setting forth the Aurelian and Filipesco bills. If they are voted, which seems likely, what will these desperate people do, from whom their last possibility of living will be taken? Will they be able to act by themselves, and in what direction? Will interventions take place in their favor, and of what kind? From evil arrived at its limit, will a remedy emerge? Will a reaction take place, provoked by the economic repercussion that the ruin of the Jews will have on the condition of the country itself — a condition already precarious and which the extreme and barbarous protectionism of its legislators cannot improve? In a word, what are the possible solutions; will they be imposed by external pressure or by internal necessities?
CONCLUSION
We must first ask ourselves whether foreign intervention is possible, legitimate, and in what manner it could be exercised. If Europe had ever had the intention of enforcing the Treaty of Berlin of 1858 upon the contracting parties, this very question would not arise. In reality, it demanded only the strict fulfillment of the clauses concerning the direct interests of the Powers that had inspired it and of that Power, Russia, which had accepted it. When England had taken Cyprus; Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina; when France saw its hands free with regard to Tunisia; when Russia had received Bessarabia; when there was no longer the fear that the Black Sea would become a Muscovite lake, little concern was given to the stipulations governing the fate of persecuted communities whether in the Balkans or in the Ottoman Empire.
For a year, the representatives of the civilized nations — which, to mask their simple territorial appetites, had made a great display of their love of justice — strove to obtain from Romania that it keep its given word. Germany, driven by its financiers engaged in Romanian affairs, was the first to abandon the parade claims, and the other governments followed. They contented themselves with a platonic declaration by the Romanians, and M. Rosetti, Minister of the Interior of the J. Bratiano cabinet, could say on December 15, 1881, to the Chamber: “The Romanians may congratulate themselves on having resolved in a national sense the most burning and most dangerous question, and this, we may now confess, contrary to the manifest will of the Powers, and contrary to the very spirit of the Treaty of Berlin.”
The Jews had had illusions and, driven by them, had asked the congress for what, they should have known, Romanian duplicity would not give them. The question was poorly posed by their representatives, misled, it is true, by the declarations and former attitude of the liberals.
Since 1864, although subject to military service obligations, the Jews were considered by the law as “foreigners not subject to a foreign protection.” Europe has allowed this absurd and anti-juridical definition to persist in Article 7 of the new Romanian constitution, that of 1879. Those concerned should have asked the congress either to name a protecting power for these “foreigners not subject to a foreign protection,” for they had to be attached to some nationality, or to reject a designation that no principle of international law can admit. (1) Romania would thus have been obliged to recognize native status for the Israelites who were not foreign subjects; it could not have applied to them the laws voted against foreigners, and the Moldo-Wallachian antisemites would have been driven to legislate against the Jews, which they would probably not have dared to do.
(1) The Jewish masses of Eastern Europe have never been really defended, and this is because their Israelite representatives, assimilated and Christianized, of Western Europe, never knew their economic condition or their needs. The ghetto, by bending the Jews under a religious-juridical formalism, made of them the perfect type of the social slave, the individual who lets himself be led by a minority of the rich. Now, these rich, or these intellectuals, in demanding the political enfranchisement of the Jews in countries where political life did not truly exist, were driven by an unconscious personal interest. They were working in fact to enfranchise themselves more fully by not suffering the material or moral repercussions of antisemitic agitations, but they failed to understand the conditions and necessities of the economic enfranchisement of those whose mandataries they had made themselves.
To ask today of Europe — which, in violation of the Treaty of Berlin, allowed the massacre of thousands of Christian Armenians by Muslims and did not know how to stop the arm of the Assassin — to ask it to prevent a Christian people from causing more than a hundred thousand Jews to perish of misery and hunger, would be too bitter an irony. To hope to rouse a conscience that has remained insensible before torrents of blood shed, by showing it a flock of haggard specters who die without noise, without disagreeable and disturbing commotion, victims of a very Christian hypocrisy, would be a vain and childish hope. What nation, moreover, would dare to speak? England, exterminator of the Boers; Russia, persecutor of the Finns and also of the Jews; France, slaughterer of Annamites or Hovas and preparing for a butchery of Moroccans; Italy, of Eritrea yesterday and Tripolitania tomorrow; Germany, ferocious executioner of Negroes or Germanizing by force the recalcitrant Poles? Who would dare raise a voice, among these nations all still bloody from the expedition to China, and whose history for more than thirty years has been nothing but a long negation of all right and all equity?
Perhaps interest alone will make them speak, interest alone is capable of making them act, and it is Romania itself that will bring about an intervention by calling, to exploit its natural riches, European capital. (1) Now, this capital will not enter a country where no guarantee is offered to it, where it has no right to administer itself, where it is forbidden to own the soil and subsoil that are the matter of its exploitation, since Article 7 of the Constitution stipulates that in rural communes foreigners may not become purchasers of land or real property. Romania will therefore be compelled, sooner or later, to modify its protectionist and xenophobic legislation, either of its own accord or because the capitalists already engaged in the country’s industries lead their government to act. (2) On that day, other claims besides those specifically put forward may be made, and inevitably the abrogation of every restrictive law will bring to the Jew, considered as a foreigner, a new right and consequently relief from his distress.
(1) The law on the exploitation of mineral resources failed because of all the restrictions enacted against foreigners, whose enforcement would have provoked the abstention of international capital.
(2) The case seems to be arising even now. To attract foreign capital to Romania, a law on the sugar industry was voted two years ago. It stipulated that: “Existing sugar factories or those that will be installed with the authorization of the government shall be entitled, until March 31, 1914, to a manufacturing premium of 16 centimes per kilogram of sugar, a premium that shall be paid after the sugar is put into consumption or exported.” This law resulted in the creation of important factories created by foreigners attracted by the premiums. In 1900, a new law was voted on the proposal of Minister Pallady, taking back the premium in the form of an export tax of 0.16 per kilogram of sugar, and by virtue of the law, sugar already sold was stopped at the frontier. The French merchants harmed addressed a complaint to M. Delcasse and asked him to intervene.
But the interest of certain nations may even drive them to intervene directly in the Jewish question and to demand of Romania either the fulfillment of the promises made in 1878 in Berlin, or a law definitively settling the fate of the Israelite population. What is in fact the aim of the antisemitic measures? It is that formerly avowed on high by Rosetti, and still today by the Antisemitic Alliance: “to make the situation of the Jews impossible and to favor their emigration from the country.” The Jews are thus pushed to flee, but after first being ruined. Thus a people cynically declares: “Here is a category of individuals whom, by my will alone, I consider as foreigners not subject to a foreign protection. I can harass them with impunity since they are not protected; I am not obliged to show them the consideration to which I am obliged with regard to the nationals of other countries. When I have made of them starving, workless wretches, I shall pour them out upon Central Europe, upon England, and upon America.” Now, Central Europe has closed its frontiers. One could see, on the borders of Transylvania and Bukovina, bands of Jews, repulsed at once by Hungary, Austria, and Romania itself, for at the beginnings of the emigration it had refused passports to its emigrants, who henceforth could be expelled from everywhere, including from their country of origin, if they wished to return. England and America now threaten to take measures to stop the influx of foreigners, and they will arrive at this driven by the inevitable development of the protectionist and imperialist spirit. (1) Let Romanian emigration resume with violence, and it will resume if the Aurelian law is voted, (2) or if a new law against Jewish workers intervenes, (3) and the governments that most dread the infiltration will inevitably turn toward Romania. They will ask it whether a nation can create out of whole cloth a class of pariahs called “foreigners not subject to a foreign protection” and oblige other countries to feed its wretches, when its nationals everywhere enjoy the rights that Romania does not recognize for the foreigners established within it. On that day, the Treaty of Berlin will be called into question again, for the Powers will be interested. They will then oblige the Romanians to give the Jews at least the native status already implicitly recognized to them by the law of 1856 on military service, which stated: Article 1: “All the inhabitants of the country shall personally owe military service.” — Article 2: “Subjects of foreign States may not be part of the army.”
(1) America has in fact closed its doors by the application of some laws, among them the sanitary law. As for England, the question of emigration, and especially of Jewish emigration, has just been raised in the House of Commons. Major Evans Gordon proposed to insert in the address to the king the following paragraph: “We respectfully call the attention of Your Majesty to the necessity of proposing a law regulating and preventing the immigration, to London and other cities of the kingdom, of poor foreigners.” The proposal was withdrawn only after a declaration by M. Balfour recognizing the dangerous consequences of immigration but declaring that a preliminary inquiry had to be opened. Meetings have also taken place to demand that immigration be forbidden. Their character has been distinctly anti-Jewish.
(2) Following the representations occasioned by the measures taken against the sugar industry, Minister Aurelian, fearing a new foreign intervention, modified Article 40 of his bill on rural police. He removed from it the provision forbidding foreigners from practicing small commerce in rural communes. The commission was very hostile to this modification, and it is probable that the Chamber will restore the suppressed article.
(3) A new bill has just been introduced by the Stourdza ministry in the Chamber on January 22, 1902. It is designed to protect Romanian labor against foreign — that is to say Jewish — labor. Here are some of its articles. They will enable one to understand what the situation of the Jewish proletariat in Romania will be when this law is voted:
ARTICLE 1. — Everyone is free to practice the trades enumerated below, if he fulfills the conditions prescribed by the present law…
ARTICLE 4. — Foreigners who wish to practice a trade must prove that there exists in their country the right of reciprocity for Romanians. Failing this proof, they must obtain the prior authorization of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Foreigners who, by virtue of a contract prior to the present law, are employed in any enterprise whatsoever, are exempt from the conditions enumerated above. The present law does not derogate from the international conventions governing this matter.
ARTICLE 8. — No one is admitted to practice a trade on his own account or to make the practice of his trade his principal occupation unless he has the Master’s Certificate.
ARTICLE 9. — Persons from outside the locality and unknown to the Committee of the Corporation must present documents proving their identity and morality, documents issued by the competent authorities.
ARTICLE 12. — Every worker must have a Booklet.
ARTICLE 13. — The Booklet is issued by the Committee of the Corporation to the following persons… 3) to those who shall prove they have worked in a factory, workshop, or construction site, in the country or abroad, for at least five years in a specialized trade.
ARTICLE 45. — Every artisan of the commune is by right a member of the corporation of his trade.
ARTICLE 70. — Only Romanians who enjoy political rights may be admitted to the Committee of the Corporation. By exception, foreigners having the right of domicile shall be admitted if they have in their service at least two-thirds Romanian apprentices and workers.
ARTICLE 82. — In addition to the penalty of a fine, the administrative authorities, at the request of the Committee of the Corporation, shall forbid the practice of the trade to those who do not have the Master’s Certificate provided for in Article 8 or the Worker’s Booklet provided for in Article 12.
ARTICLE 90. — The present law shall enter into force six months after its publication in the Official Monitor.
ARTICLE 91. — All those who, at the publication of the present law, shall have practiced for two years a trade on their own account shall be considered, by exception, as masters, and a certificate shall be issued to them by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. If the Chamber of Commerce and Industry refuses or issues without reason a certificate, the interested parties may appeal to the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Domains, which shall decide definitively. The Minister may delegate this faculty to a special Commission composed of three senior officials of the ministry.
ARTICLE 92. — To all workers who, until the entry into force of the present law, shall prove that they have effectively worked in a trade for at least two years, shall be issued, by exception, a Worker’s Booklet, in accordance with what is prescribed in the preceding article for the Master’s Certificate.
ARTICLE 95. — In all public works enterprises, Romanians shall be preferred to foreigners on equal terms. In the specifications of public works or supplies, the clause shall be inserted that the contractor may not employ foreign artisans except in the proportion fixed by the public administration according to the nature of the works and the region in which they are carried out.
There is a foreign intervention that is plausible. There would be another possible one: it would be if the Jews themselves, invoking the status attributed to them of “foreigners not subject to a foreign protection” and desirous of leaving this abnormal and dangerous situation, were to ask a European nation to protect them. But the Jews would never dare resort to this extreme means of defense. Persecution or misery have depressed them morally as well as physically and intellectually, (1) and they are not capable of an effort that would imply a series of violent struggles. On the other hand, what nation would have a real, immediate interest in intervening in Romanian affairs? Russia alone, and what advantage would the Jews have in passing under the Muscovite yoke? The fate of their Russian brethren can let them foresee.
(1) Because of their exclusion from the schools.
It remains only for us to see whether, by the force of things, Romania itself will not be led to modify its line of conduct toward the Israelites; whether inevitably its own economic situation will not compel its antisemitic nationalism to capitulate.
The protective legislation has not weighed solely upon the Jews. Provoked, fomented by a band of politicians who have no real economic interest in the country, who live solely from the budget and must maintain themselves by all possible means, it has had repercussions on both the State and on private individuals. It has fallen back first upon the State through a decrease in the revenues from taxes and duties: a decline in the proceeds from beverage licenses, following the law of 1884; a decline in communal revenues, after the laws of 1887 and 1889 limiting the categories of individuals admitted to bid for these revenues; a decline in taxes and licenses from settlements and small towns, classified as rural communes, when the Jews were to be driven from them. As long as these measures struck only the government by obliging it to otherwise ensure the balance of its budget, it had not yet appeared to the taxpayers that the increase in their burdens could stem from the application of these laws. With emigration, they felt themselves directly affected. In the emptied cities, the rental rate dropped by 33%; a crowd of small Romanian merchants, who lived only from the Jew, were ruined at a stroke by the exodus of their clients; the Wallachian boyars, owners of the great estates, found themselves harmed by the departure of the unreplaced Jewish intermediary, and a day is near when these interests will coalesce, all the more so since they will be increasingly affected.
The protectionism of the Moldavian petty bourgeoisie does not correspond to reality; it is a shopkeeper protectionism of the small town, convinced that a tiny minority suffices to satisfy the needs of consumption and that it can impose maximum tariffs on consumers. The truth is that there exist no Romanian classes to substitute for the Jews either as merchants or as workers. (1) Thus, when the law on tobacco factories was enforced, the Jewish workers could not be replaced. (2) An interpellation by M. Tocilescou, in February 1890, made known that Jews still holding tobacco retail licenses existed. The Finance Minister replied that the Romanians, finding the return below the effort, had sold their licenses to Jews who were content with a meager profit, and that in certain communes not even natives presented themselves, for they disdained such trifling positions. (3) I have shown that the same was true for the practice of medicine, and that the number of national agricultural laborers was insufficient. If tomorrow the Aurelian law and the labor protection law are voted, the Romanian peasant will have no grocers, bakers, carpenters, wheelwrights, roofers, masons, etc., and the landowner will see the revenue from his properties decline further. The natural consequence will be a diminution in the yield of taxes. (4)
(1) “The Romanian,” M. Carp declared in 1873 in Parliament, “is not accustomed to work; he is insufficient on the commercial and industrial terrain.” “The population of our towns,” M. Poni, Minister of Public Education, affirmed in the Chamber in 1896, “is for the most part foreign. We do not have a national bourgeoisie.”
(2) There is beginning to be a national proletariat in Wallachia, but it scarcely exists in Moldavia.
(3) The Romanian civil servant and budget-eater refuses so minimal an employment.
(4) Emigration societies methodically emptying some towns of their Jewish artisans and small traders would assuredly hasten the crisis.
What can the government do then, already grappling with nearly inextricable financial difficulties? Romania has a debt of one billion 675 million, not counting a floating debt of 110 million. The money from the loans, come from abroad, has returned abroad; it left the coffers to pay for railway equipment or war materiel. The railways, bought back by the State, do not produce the interest on the capital invested, and as a result of the megalomaniac policy that has brought Romania into the Triple Alliance, the war budget increases every year; it is 58 million out of a total budget of 240 million, (1) and by the royal will of Charles of Romania, it is irreducible. There can be no reduction except on the budget of the civil servants, who draw 62 million out of the 182 remaining. Now, these civil servants — that is, the governing and directing Romanian bourgeoisie — will certainly accept for some time the reduction, (2) in the hope of better days; but if these days do not come, they will seek to levy new taxes. (3) On whom will they levy them? On the sole, the unique taxable person, on the one subject to forced labor on whom the unproductive class lives — on the peasant.
(1) Without counting the unforeseen. For example, 350 million were spent to have Bucharest fortified by the Belgian general Brialmont.
(2) A reduction of 23 million has already been made on the latest budget. Others will doubtless be consented to, in the fear of a bankruptcy that would place Romania under European financial control, which would be another external solution.
(3) The government will certainly try first to increase the rate of leases on its domains, farmed out to a clientele of politicians, but it runs the risk of seriously discontenting that clientele.
Only one party could have proposed other solutions, or at least opposed dangerous proposals. That would have been the socialist party, had it been possible in Romania; but its existence was linked to the emancipation of the only Romanian proletariat — that is, the Jewish proletariat — which, acquiring political rights, could have supported the party. In the absence of this support, its existence was bound to be precarious, as its birth had been artificial. It had been imported into Romania around 1875 by two Russian revolutionaries: an Orthodox, Petroff, and a Jew, Nahum Katz, who took the name Dobrogeano Gherea, converted, married a Romanian woman, and was naturalized. They were joined first by a Gypsy, Jean Nadedje, later by some other young men, and the first communist association was founded. Its members were exclusively Jewish workers. Socialism was condemned in Romania to defend the rights of the Jews or to disappear, in the absence of a national proletariat of which it would have been the representative and above all — given the country’s political organization — the elected voice. It defended them at its beginnings, but little by little, hounded by the government, which prevented its newspapers and publications from penetrating the countryside; defeated in the person of those of its members who had originally been democratic deputies and were not reelected as socialists; compromised by the liberal party to which it was allied when that party took the lead of the antisemitic movement; desirous of participating in the prebends and of also living from the budget, it disappeared. Its last remnants merged with the liberals and became, like them, nationalist, protectionist, and anti-Jewish. As for the Jewish proletarians, their impulse toward socialism was stopped by the persecutions, by the expulsions, and by the excess of misery that ruined the nascent organizations. There exist today only a few small groups, with a single periodical publication as their organ, issuing from time to time a propaganda pamphlet.
The peasant will therefore be defended by no one. Nowhere is he so mistreated as in Romania, so miserable. The man of the soil, in this country, is still close to the ancient serf; he was emancipated in name, but in fact he has remained the slave of the boyar, who keeps him in ignorance and squalor, who considers his sons as his property, his daughter or his wife as his plaything. The politician has done nothing for him; not a centime of the loan money has been devoted to any improvement of the soil, not even to the indispensable irrigation. Agriculture is so backward that this fertile and rich soil yields a return scarcely equal to a quarter of the yield obtained in France. When the peasant has paid his tax, the interest on his mortgage or on borrowed money, he barely has enough to provide for his own food or that of his family. Like the Jew, his brother in suffering, he starves on his field, in his sordid house where air is rationed to him. I have told how his plot was assigned to him, how he inevitably subdivided it, how the State had been obliged to distribute new lands, how it was condemned to sell him still more, even if it meant, as in 1880, remitting the sums he owed in payment of his arrears of annuities. This parcel that he cannot cultivate for lack of the necessary means, the peasant is compelled to subdivide ceaselessly and to mortgage. Ultimately, when the land becomes alienable, it will revert to the great landowners, from whom the State will be forced one day to buy it back, when its own domain is exhausted, to distribute it again among the dispossessed.
It is this fear of agrarian demands that drives, perhaps unconsciously, some politicians to call for laws designed to drive out the Jewish worker. They hope thus to proletarianize some of their peasants, but it is a chimerical hope, and the peasant revolt remains the formidable terror of the governors and budget-eaters of Romania. They have already seen, in 1888, rioting in the countryside; they have seen the peasants rise up, invade the properties, throw the harvests into the rivers, destroy everything in their path. The bourgeoisie of the agrarians and civil servants ferociously repressed the revolt, killing and imprisoning the insurgents. It has not thereby solved the problem. If tomorrow it prepares to load its serf once more with taxes, it will rekindle the torch. Perhaps, if it drives the Jew to despair, if it pushes him to the limit, he, despite his passivity, despite the counsel of his timorous rich, will unite with the field worker and help him to shake off the yoke. But even if he does not join him, it is one day the revolted Romanian peasant who, directly or indirectly, will resolve the present Jewish question in Romania, by liberating himself and by liberating the Jew.
January-February 1902