Introduction
In the post-Holocaust world, a vast amount of research has been focused on the origins, means, methods, reasons, and arguments of Nazi anti-Semitism. Due to the centrality of Germany in the Holocaust, the research on anti-Semitism has focused on Germany and has neglected, to some extent, the pan-European phenomenon which was XIXth century anti-Semitism. Romania occupies a particularly marginal position in Western research because of its isolation during the communist period, as well as because of its refusal to admit the existence of the Romanian Holocaust and to fund and encourage research on this topic until 2004. The western bibliography on the Iron Guard is rather small as compared to that on Nazism while the one dealing with the pre-World War I period is even smaller. Actually, most analyses of pre-World War I Romanian anti-Semitism can be found as prefaces to histories of interwar Romania and the Iron Guard. Moreover, only a small number of people, many times personal witnesses and victims of the events in question, have taken up the study of Romanian anti-Semitism. This study seeks to redress such a problem. In addition to fact that the bibliography on this field is rather small, very little of it is analytic, providing causes and explanations. Most of the literature is descriptive, discussing similar authors and problems, but rarely attempting conceptualizations, explanations and comparisons. Comparatively analyzing Romanian intellectual anti-Semitism could shed answers on several questions and contradictions. William O. Oldson begins his book by stating one of them: if Romania was, as Hannah Arendt calls it, „the most anti-Semitic country in pre-war Europe” how come that its genocide was also associated with the survival of half of the Jewish community in Romania1? How come that Romania bluntly refused to participate in the execution of the Final Solution, just after it had deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to the far-off territories of Transnistria?2 Dennis Deletant notes the same contradiction when claiming that, to Marshall Antonescu, Jews were not a racial threat, but unpatriotic and unassimilated inhabitants. Deletant also points to the survival of the assimilated Walachian and Transylvanian Jewish communities.3 Secondly, a comparative investigation of Romanian anti-Semitism could also shed light on another debate still fresh in Western scholarship. An approach related to the intentionalist perspective on the Final Solution sees anti-Semitism in Germany as an „eternal hatred” surviving from pre-Christian times, and forming the backbone of the new, racist anti-Semitism of the Nazis4. In this view, there is some similarity or at least compatibility between the anti-Semitism practiced as a „cultural code”5 in the XIXth century and the Nazi form of biological racism. Conversely, the other point of view argues for the novelty of the Nazi anti-Semitism, in view of its biological racism.6 A comparison between well-known XIXth century biological 1 William O. Oldson, A Providential anti-Semitism: Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth Century Romania, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society v. 193, Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1991, pp. 2–3. 2 Oldson, op cit, p. 4. 3 Dennis Deletant, „The Holocaust in Transnistria: An Overview in the Light of Recent Research,” in Moldova, Bessarabia, Transnistria, Occasional Papers in Romanian Studies, ed. Rebecca Haynes, London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2003, p 143–161. 4 William W. Hagen, „Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” The Journal of Modern History , 68, no. 2, June 1, 1996, pp. 351–381. 5 Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106–118. 6 Hagen, „Before the ‘Final Solution’, op. cit ”, p. 362. Sfera Politicii nr. 4 (176) / 2013
99