Jew and Peasant in Interwar Romania^*

Abstract

Common historical wisdom has it that the Peasant Revolt of 1907 and the elections of December 1937 reflected the profound anti-Semitism of the Romanian peasantry. And since the events of 1907 and 1937 have also been looked upon as decisive in determining the course of the history of the peasantry, if not of Romania as such, it seems only proper to assess the accuracy of these contentions.The revolt of 1907 was indeed a social movement directed against the exploitation of the impoverished Moldavian and Wallachian peasantry by Romanian landlords and Jewish “arendaşi” (Leaseholders). After 1907, and throughout the interwar years, Romanian historiography and political propaganda stressed the anti-Semitic character of the uprising in an effort to exonerate the absentee, and other, Romanian landowners and to emphasize the exploitative nature of Jews and Jewish capitalism. The Jewish question was organically connected with the peasant question in a variety of ways, all condemnatory of Jewish and Judaizing capitalism.As none of the major political parties of pro-World War I Romania—or, for that matter, few of interwar Romania as well—paid more than lip service to the economic and social plight of the peasants, it was convenient to regard the Jew as the root cause of all the evils affecting the peasantry. Before World War I, populists and, paradoxically, socialists enunciated political theories regarding “neoserfdom,” which, however different in origin, converged in demands for radical land reform. The reform came not because of such demands but because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Officially, it was unrelated to any political ideology, certainly separated from the Jewish question which, in theory, was resolved concurrently with the peasant question through the granting of citizenship and extension of political rights to the Jews of Romania. Following the countrywide agrarian reform in Greater Romania the peasant and the Jewish questions were in fact severed as Jews and Jewish capitalism had virtually no connections with the land.

Can Jews Become Farmers? Rurality, Peasantry and Cultural Identity in the World of the Rural Jew in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe

“…That odor interpreted the Russian phrase Matiushka Zemlya -Mother Earth, a mother giving suck from bountiful breasts to countless children. Since they were members of a sub-community that was seen by the majority group as 'other', they never integrated into the social fabric of the local life, 36 and never disconnected themselves from the actual or symbolic experience of the wandering Jew, moving from place to place, from one piece of land to the other. 34 Yet, internalising this aspect depends on the way the local, immediate earth is perceived in the consciousness of the rural individual.…”

“…Their cultural essence was not derived from the immanent connection to the source from whence they sprang, namely, the land, but rather from its symbolic meaning for the observer. Since they were members of a sub-community that was seen by the majority group as 'other', they never integrated into the social fabric of the local life, 36 and never disconnected themselves from the actual or symbolic experience of the wandering Jew, moving from place to place, from one piece of land to the other. This ambivalence was expressed:…”