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This chapter deals with the dualistic relationships between the Jewish minority, the Christian majority and the Romanian authorities. This duplcity was expressed, on the one hand, in restrictions and prohibitions imposed by the authorities, and on the other hand, in the informal mechanisms that operated in the daily economic and social life - which sometimes contradicted the policy of the authorities.
In the first period of the establishment of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldova, the rulers granted Jewish craftsmen privileges and encouraged them to come and settle in them. The Jews in the Principalities enjoyed relative freedom for several reasons; first, the inhabitants of Romania were not Catholics, and therefore, despite the traditional hostility of the Christians towards the Jews, there was no religious zealotry, no ghettos nor mass deportations. Another reason relates to the influence of the Ottoman Empire, whose rulers tolerated national minorities and gave them a measure of autonomy.
In the days of the struggle for the unification of the Principalities into one state and the liberation from foreign influences, Ottoman and Russian, the Jews had hope that they would receive civil rights. Indeed, in 1848, the Romanian revolutionaries announced their intention to give Jews equal rights and invited them to join the struggle. Many Jews responded to the call, but with the suppression of the revolt, their situation deteriorated again. After the restoration of Ottoman rule in 1856, the Paris Conference required the Principalities to grant the Jews civil rights, but this was not implemented, although Jews were once again allowed to settle anywhere and to buy land.
In 1859 when Romania was united under Alexandru Ion Koza, Jews were promised the right to vote for municipal councils, but this promise was also violated with the removal of Koza from power. When Carol I came to power in 1866, he proposed a new constitution which included a clause for the rights of Jewish citizenship. This section of the constitution provoked anti-government demonstrations and was eventually dropped from the constitution. Restrictions were again placed on the rights of Jews to settle anywhere and choose their own profession.
At the Peace Conference in Berlin in 1878, decisions were made requiring Romania to recognize the civil rights of Jews and to remove the economic restrictions imposed on them. Although Romania signed an agreement to do so, it did not honor it, and conditioned citizenship on the independent approval of the two Houses of Parliament for each request. In the 35 years up to World War I, only 2,000 of the approximately 240,000 Jews received Romanian citizenship. Because of the failure of Emancipation and their difficult economic situation, many Romanian Jews emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and were among the first immigrants to Israel in the late 19th century.
In 1913, Romania annexed southern Dobrogea from Bulgaria, and following World War I, it annexed Hungary from Transylvania, Austria from Bukovina, and Bessarabia from Russia. Following the annexation of these areas, the number of Jews increased and reached 750,000. The Allies appealed to Romania as the leader of the minority regime to guarantee their status, and grant Romanian citizenship to the Jews, including full civil and political rights. These laws were officially ratified in the 1923 constitution, but in practice the Jews did not enjoy full equality, and because of rising Nationalism, Romanians harassed all minorities, especially the Jews, and in 1926 this was seen first at universities, 'Numerus Clausus'.
In the 1930s, two main anti-Semitic organizations operated in Romania: the League for Christian National Defense and the Iron Guard. These organizations had great influence in preparing the country for the removal of the Jews from Romanian society. With the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, hatred of the Jews in Romania increased. In the summer of 1934, laws of discrimination against Jews were passed in commerce and industry. In late December 1937 an anti-Semitic government was established in Romania, the second in Europe after Germany. In its forty days of existance, this government managed to enact a law to examine Jewish citizenship, according to which the civil rights of a quarter of a million Jews were revoked. Even after the fall of that government, the laws of discrimination remained in effect, and in the summer of 1940 new laws were adopted in Romania in the form of the Nuremberg Laws; citizenship of Jews was revoked and intermarriage prohibited.
In September 1940, the fascist Hungarian regime took control of northern Transylvania and gradually imposed a regime of prohibitions, restrictions and legislation against the Jews in economic, social and cultural spheres. In the Holocaust, the fate of the Jews in these areas was identical to that of Hungarian Jewry, and about 135,000 were murdered after they were deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944.
With the outbreak of the war in the Soviet Union, Antonescu ordered 40,000 Jews living in villages and towns from their homes and confiscated their property. This step was included in the implementation of the old "anti-Semitic dream" of the Romanians to "purify" the villages of Jews. The Antonescu administration saw the possibility of "liberating" Romania from Jews, but in contrast to other fascist regimes, it divided the Romanian Jews into two groups and treated them in seperate ways: one for the Jews of Serbia and Bukovina and the other for the Jews of the Regat and Transylvania.
During the first weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union by the armies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Germany in June 1941, the Romanian army, in accordance with Antonescu's instructions and in cooperation with German army units and some of the local population, carried out terrible massacres of the Jewish population of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (areas annexed by the Soviet Union in June 1940) during which about 100,000-120,000 Jews were murdered. Similar massacres were committed by soldiers of the Romanian army in western Ukraine and especially in Odessa. Romanian soldiers and policemen also massacred some 15,000 Jews in Iași and carried out pogroms against Jews in other Romanian cities.
The Jews of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina who had survived the massacres were expelled to Transnistria by order of Antonescu in the summer and autumn of 1941, where about 120,000 of the deportees perished. Altogether, 380,000 to 400,000 Jews were murdered in Romanian-controlled areas during the rule of Antonescu.
In most of the areas of Regat and southern Transylvania, throughout the Fascist regime, a series of laws were implemented that caused the impoverishment of the Jews and their exploitation as the suppliers of forced labor. However, the different goals of the government and its ideological background became apparent due to problems related to Romania's war aims, fear of its German partner, and intervention of the leaders of the Jewish community, led by Wilhelm Filderman and Alexandru Shafran, those who were deterred by the Nazi methods and sensitive to the fate of the Jews,
Of the Jews of Romania the fate of those from the areas of Regat and southern Transylvania was different than that of the other Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, both in the conditions in which they lived during the war and in the number of survivors. Thus, about half of the Jews who were in Romania prior to World War II were saved from the Holocaust, more than any other country in Europe. At the end of the war, about 380,000 Jews remained in Romania.
After a short period of transition between 1944 and 1948, which ended after the short-lived democratic regime was defeated, a totalitarian communist regime was established in Romania that abolished the rights and liberties of the individual. The reaction of the Romanian Jews was not uniform, but most of them chose the option of immigration. Therefore, the immigration of the vast majority of Romanian Jews to Israel symbolizes the last chapter of a long Jewish history within Romania's borders.
