Recently the local telephone company, a subsidiary of the American-controlled International Telegraph and Telephone Company, advertised for fifty “pure Rumanian” mechanics — meaning that no Jews need apply. In many respects, this “ad,” buried in the columns of the Bucharest press, is a more important indication of what is happening to Rumanian Jewry than headline news concerning citizenship revisions, or the indictment for high treason of Codreanu, the Iron Guard leader.
Slowly, remorselessly and on all economic fronts, the Jews is being deprived of opportunities for employment. He has been turned out of Government posts; large corporations refuse to employ him; he is being hounded out of the legal profession and is being smoked out of his last sanctuary, the retail store and the small factory by the State-controlled National Bank which increasingly refuses to grant him credits.
It would not be true, of course, to say that not a Jew in all Rumania is making money. Bucharest has witnessed a tremendous building boom in the last few years – there are parts of this old city more modernistic, if not more modern, than anything in London or New York – and Jews as well as others have profited. But in a land where of 900,000 Jewish inhabitants, more than sixty per cent customarily live from hand to mouth, the slightest economic persecution evokes immediate disastrous effects.
By and large, this anti-Semitic warfare is being engineered by the Iron Guard and affiliated Jew-hating elements comprising chiefly a younger generation drunk with nationalism and hungry for power and jobs. Rumania is rich with oil, true; but apparently there is not enough of it to still the stormy waters now threatening to engulf the nation’ Jewry. And the Government, where it does not actually abet anti-Semitism (as in the case of restriction of credits for Jews) does nothing to discourage it except occasionally to arrest an over-zealous student who smashes a Jew’s window.
Besides this economic phenomenon, the current revision of citizenship which might conceivably de-naturalize fifty percent of Rumania’s Jews, is merely Balkan theatrics staged to appease the anti-Semites. Not that loss of citizenship will not inflict a moral and economic hurt on thousands of persons who have considered themselves Rumanians for a generation or more; in many cases, indeed, it may lead to impoverishment and other tribulations.
But for thousands of Jews already overwhelmed by tribulations, it can matter very little. How can it affect the poverty-stricken Jews whose daily lives are circumscribed by the market places of provincial ghettoes where they squat with their wares of cracked glass, nails and other oddments? Such persons would not know where to go, nor have the wherewithal to go, even if they had the passport to which every citizen is entitled.
The fact is that under the complicated citizenship revision law, of the 800,000 Rumanian Jews whose citizenship is subject to revision, only sixty percent have turned in the documents necessary to retain their status. The other forty percent found the documents – birth certificates, etc., unobtainable or too costly to obtain. The last few years have witnessed an important migration of Jews to the larger cities, notably Bucharest, and not many of these new city-dwellers can afford the railway fares back to their native towns in order to get the necessary affidavits. They lost their citizenship by default.
The Rumanian Courts are now at work on the tendered documents and the results will be known soon. The revision law itself is full of holes large enough to admit not only the prejudices of judges but also considerable graft. After the first results, appeals will be in order. And, in the end, as one observer points out, should a war come, what has been taken by decree can be restored by decree and in all probability re-created Jewish citizens will again be marching to the front.
Such an eventuality, of course, pre-supposes a complete and permanent Government victory in its present campaign against the Nazi Iron Guards – a victory which is by no means assured. In this battle, the Jews lie in an appallingly vulnerable position. The Iron Guards hate the Jews with a first-class imported venom; the Government itself, at this writing still headed by the anti-Semitic Patriarch Miron Christea, hates them less violently but apparently more effectively, to judge by the conomic results. As between the two, the Jews side with the Government.
Yet, ironically, the Jews dare neither help the Government nor applaud its victories. As it is, the Iron Guard turns its own defeats at the hands of the Government into first-class anti-Semitic propaganda. Every time an Iron Guardist leader is arrested, his followers cry out that King Carol has sold out to the Jews. In the end, should the Rumanian Nazis be victorious, the Jews will have to suffer three-fold for every persecution suffered by the Iron Guards.
In Reality, the fight by the King and his Government against the Codreanu forces is primarily a fight between two Fascist camps, one a little more radical and more rabidly anti-Semitic than the other. The pot is boiling; it remains only to see who is going to throw the Jews into it.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
