Rumania’s new anti-Semitic code-dividing Jews into three restricted social and economic classes–was published Friday on the front page of all Bucharest newspapers.
A separate decree law, forbidding the inter-marriage of Jews and persons of “Rumanian blood” and annulling all mixed marriages that had occurred in the past, was published alongside the general decree law reducing Jews to the inferior social and economic level reserved for them in the “New Order” now being established in Europe.
The two anti-Semitic laws, along with the text of Premier Ion Gigurtu’s speech Thursday night exhorting the Rumanian nation to accept with calm the territorial
sacrifices they will be called on to make, pushed all other news off the front page.
It is considered significant that the publication of the anti-Semitic code and the Premier’s speech were timed to appear, side by side, in the same edition of all Rumanian newspapers.
Observers here interpret the coincidence as an attempt on the part of the Government to divert the attention of readers from the unpleasant thought of the amputation of territory to the thought, pleasant to some, that Gentile businessmen and professionals will no longer have to compete with Jews on an equal footing.
Henceforth, “blood Rumanians” will be the patricians of the new totalitarian Rumania while her 450,000 Jews will serve as the plebeians.
By far the most onerous of the new restrictions on Jewish liberty is the retroactive provision of the special ban on intermarriage. As a matter of fact, however, it will not be the full-blooded Jews who will suffer most from this provision, but the offspring of all the mixed marriages that have occurred in Rumania since the limited emancipation of Jews in 1879 after the war of independence.
By the retroactive nullification of all such marriages, the offspring of first and second class Jews–and they number many thousands– will be reduced to the status of illegitimates and stripped of their civil rights.
Except for this provision–perhaps the most stringent of any anti-Jewish law of modern times, except the Nuremberg laws in Germany–the new Rumanian anti-Semitic code is somewhat less onerous than that of Hungary, which it markedly resembles.
The law defines Jews as all persons of Mosaic faith, all offspring of such persons; all persons born of a Christian mother and an unbaptized Jewish father, all Christians born of an unmarried Jewish mother, all wives of Christians not baptized before June 20,1940 (the day the Party of the Nation was established), all Jewish atheists and all persons belonging to Jewish communities. Baptism after the publication of the law will not change a person’s Jewish status.
The three classes into which Jews are divided are as follows:
1–All Jews who were living in Rumania prior to Dec.30,1918, after “Old Rumania” had acquired Transylvania from Hungary and Bessarabia from Russia.
2–All Jews naturalized by individual decrees before Dec. naturalized collectively according to the provision of the modified constitution of 1879; all Jews living in the Dobrudja who were naturalized following its annexation in 1879; all Jews who fought “on the line of fire” in Rumanian wars and who were not taken prisoner individually, or disappeared, or who entered the territory occupied by Germany from 1916 to 1918; all Jews who were wounded, decorated or cited by decree for acts of bravery in time of war; and finally all descendants of Jews who were killed in action of their widows.
3–To the third class of Jews belong all persons–at least three-quarters of the present Rumanian Jewish population–who do not pertain to either of the two fore going classes.
(According to latest official Rumanian figures, quoted by the German wireless, the country’s 450,000 Jews are divided into categories as follows: 210,000 in Class I, comprising all Jews who came to Rumania after Dec.30, 1918; 10,000 in Class II, including all those who were nationalized in Rumania until Dec.30, 1918 and who were at the front in Rumania’s wars; 230,000 in Class III, which comprises all other Jews. This census was taken according to membership in the Jewish denomination. With the cession of Bessarabia and North Bukowina to Soviet Russia, roughly 330,000 Jews were taken over by the U.S.S.R., the German wireless said.)
First and third class Jews are deprived of the rights to become civil servants, members of any profession having direct relation with the civil services–that is, all lawyers and all other professionals, including doctors, employed by official boards, committees, services, and corporations.
These Jews are also deprived of the right to become members of the boards of directors of any enterprise, public or private. The provision which will perhaps work the greatest hardship on the Jewish community in general, however, is that which bans Jewish merchants from all Rumanian villages. In general, all such persons are relatively poor and lack the means of readapting themselves to new modes of existence that many urban professionals possess.
One prohibition on first and third class Jews is interesting mainly as a curiosity: the ban on all Jewish tutors and guardians of Christian ” incapables.”
Certain provisions are reminiscent of the anti-Jewish law in Hungary–those forbidding Jews to belong to or to lead national sporting associations or teams, to deal in tobacco, liquor or other monopoly products, and to sell newspapers, magazines and books printed in Rumanian.
As in Hungary, too, Jews will no longer be allowed to become army officers. Their military service obligations will remain unchanged, however, except under certain conditions, when they may satisfy their military obligations by the payment of a special tax.
The new anti-Semitic code permits first class Jews, however, to follow any free profession recognized by law provided they hold no office in any professional organization. It permits third class Jews to follow any profession not specifically banned by previous decree. Second class Jews–that is, war veterans and their descendants and all Jews living in Old Rumania who were naturalized prior to 1919–are deprived of none of their civil rights except the right to own rural property, use Rumanian names, and to follow a military career.
All rural property owned by the Jews of whatever class will be liquidated. The Government reserves for itself, however, first right in the purchase of all Jewish property.
The law makes no mention of educational rights for Jews except to state that “primary, secondary, professional and superior educational facilities for Jews” will be defined by decree at some time in the future.
Heretofore Jews have had the right under the constitution to enter all State schools of whatever category, but in practice they have had to pay special fees in primary and secondary schools and have been excluded by numerous clausus–and in some cases numerous nullus–regulations in colleges and universities.
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.
