Unlike the Hungarians and
Romanians in Transylvania, the Jews arrived very much later in this "land
behind the forest". At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th
century Jews from the rest of Eastern Europe migrated to Transylvania.
Many of them came from Poland. They settled in counties like Maramures,
Satu-Mare and Bihor. It is difficult to say how many Jews there were at
that time, mainly because the population registration did not register
them as being Jewish if they did not have Yiddish as their mother tongue.
Only in 1920 did they measure the size of the Jewish community with also
the natural origin as criteria. That resulted in an amount of 171.443 people
with only the natural origin as criteria. Most of the Jews were engaged
in commerce and lived concentrated in the towns and cities. About 11% of
urban and 2% of rural population consisted of Jews of which most regarded
Hungarian as their mother tongue. In comparison in the Banat 1/3 of the
Jews found German to be their mother tongue.
World War Two
One question that comes into
mind when you think about the Jews in Transylvania is:
Even before WWII Romania
was a German Ally. During the war Romania had a big conflict regarding
Hungarian claims on Transylvania. To keep things quiet, Hitler tried to
get Hungary and Romania (both having pro-German governments) on the negotiating
table. This to prevent an internal war in Eastern Europe apart from Hitler's
own war. This resulted in the second Vienna award, which divided Transylvania
into two parts; the Northern half with a slight Hungarian majority was
assigned to Hungary the southern part was assigned to Romania because of
its Romanian majority. This action resulted in a great fled of people:
A series of anti-Jewish laws
were issued in the war. For example, permits for Jewish-owned monopolies
were withdrawn on December 31, 1940. A measure went into effect on April
1, 1941. It ordered the expropriation of all Jewish real estate in urban
areas as well as the property of Jewish communities. Only the homes of
rabbis were exempted. Furthermore after August 1, 1941, Jewish males between
18 and 50 were drafted into "labor service brigades" and sent to work
at the front at unspeakable conditions. According to official 1942 census,
the Jewish population of Romania numbered approximately 300.000, of whom
50.000-60.000 were engaged in permanent labor service. In addition to
forced labor at the front and elsewhere, a significant proportion of the
Jewish population fell victim to ultra-nationalist pogroms and deportations.
The failure of Romania's
foreign policy regarding the lost territories during WWII casted a shadow
on the domestic politics of Antonescu's government. This lack of success
he blamed on the national minorities, particularly on the Jews and the
Hungarians. In contrast the German minority got protection by the German
"Dritte Reich".
Losses
This world war had a high
price; there was a big loss of population of which the national minorities
in Romania suffered the biggest losses. It is estimated that between 700.000
and 800.000 people were lost because of the war in Transylvania; of these
350.000 to 400.000 were Jews; 200.000 German (they had to join in the German
army) and 150.000 to 200.000 Hungarians [2]. These numbers include deaths,
deportations and disappearances.
By the end of the war the
Jewish population was halved. A large proportion fell victim to the racial
hatred, which escalated from the anti-Semitic excesses into mass murder
as early as the 1930s.
Deportations
To get a picture of the scale
of deportation and emigration I'll compare the census from 1930 and 1948.
The 1930 census showed 518.754 Jewish inhabitants in the whole of Romania
calculated on the bases of language. The 1948 census shows only 138.795
Jewish inhabitants left in Romania.
Data concerning the losses
suffered by the Jewish population are somewhat contradictory, even the
numbers from 1956 say that only 32.4% of the Jews from 1930 still live
in Romanian territory, in 1966 that is just 9.5%. During and before the
Second World War, about 2/3 of the Jews in Northern Transylvania clamed
the Hungarian nationality, that way they were save till 1944. At that time
the Germans began deportations helped by the Hungarian government.
Emigration
Just after the war the emigration
of Jews from Transylvania started, ultimately they went to their new-born
state; Israel in 1948. According to some sources about 128.609 Jews arrived
in Israel between 1948 and 1952, other sources say that it is more something
like 93.000 Jews who went there. In 1977 the Jewish Yearbook put the number
of Jews in Romania at about 60.000 of whom approximately 40.000 lived in
Bucharest.
Anyway emigration to Israel
is still continuing like there are still Germans from Transylvania who
are going to Germany or at least thinking about it.
Demographic analysis of the diagram
Jews. I'll give an
analysis of the diagram above.
Another interesting thing
is that there is such a big difference between the amount of Jews measured
by the two criteria. In 1930 there were 178.799 Jews by national origin
and just 109.868 Jews who had Yiddish as their mother tongue. From this
you can say that there are a lot of Jews who are so far assimilated that
they no longer see Yiddish as their first language but Hungarian or Romanian.
It is visible that the assimilation degree increases during time because
of the political actions that were directly aimed at assimilating the national
minorities in Romania. From the figures from 1966: 1.000 Jews by language
and 14.000 by nationality this phenomenon is even better visible then those
from 1956: 9.744 Jews by language and 43.814 Jews by nationality. So the
assimilation degree rose to 93.3% in 1966, without any doubt I can say
that this figure is even higher at this moment, especially because a lot
of Jews emigrated to Israel and other countries after the 1989 revolution.
Apart from the losses in
population through emigration another thing occurred, the very low birth
rate. This was just the thing that the government wanted.
Romanians. From
the percentages of the Romanians in Transylvania you can clearly see that
the policies of the governments from the first halve of this century were
successful. The number of Romanians increased from 57.8% in 1930 to 65.0%
in 1956 to 67.9% in 1966 and eventually to 88.1% in the whole of Romania
in 1977. This is not only because of the governmental influence but also
it is by natural causes. The Romanians have a higher birth rate then their
national minorities. This was a governmental policy, to get a bigger majority
merely by outgrowing the rest.
There is something strange
about the difference between the percentages of Romanians in Transylvania,
1930; 0.4% (of the whole Transylvanian population) more Romanians by language
then by national origin, in 1966 thin has decreased to 0.1%.
An explanation may be that
through the natural assimilation of minorities, there are people who have
Romanian as their native language but still consider themselves as being
a member of a minority. In time the amount of people who have such a "split
nationality" decreases because they then have children who also have Romanian
as their native language but they now think of themselves as being Romanians
by nationality as well. It is also possible that they changed their nationality
by means of a mixed marriage with a Romanian.
Hungarians. This
phenomenon also occurs with the Hungarians only then the figures are different,
2.3% in 1930, 0.5% in 1956 and 0.4% in 1966. Also here I can conclude that
there is a big amount of assimilating being done by the Hungarians, but
there is something different. The people here with such a "split nationality"
do not seem to turn themselves to the nationality of their language that
much. Maybe there are still people who are turning to Hungarian as their
mother tongue or they do not start seeing themselves as Hungarians cause
they are a minority as well.
Germans. For
the Germans in Transylvania it seems to be different, they seem to act
as a 'real minority' with a sort of closed community like the Jews. Only
then they stick with their own language unlike the Jews. This is visible
because the amount of Germans calculated by language is almost the same
as when you would use nationality as criterion. The German population also
clearly had great losses cause of the war, the number from 1930: 542.068
decreases to 332.066 in 1948. The loss by means of emigration is not that
well visible, because there still was a slight population growth over time.
Urbanization
One thing that is special
about Transylvania is that it is the most urbanized area of Romania.
Still in 1930 Romania had
an urban population of only 20.1% and the minorities lived (more then the
Romanians) in the Cities and towns. That was not really the way that the
government wanted things to be, so they tried to get the people to go to
the cities and develop the industry there. With a new measure, they wanted
to hit "two flies at once" by using force to get people to go to the cities.
Only merely the Romanians were send to the cities, not the minority groups,
so that they got stuck in the rural areas. They were hardly able to get
jobs anymore in anything else than in the agricultural sector.
In 1978 the urban population
still was very small, 48.6% and the agricultural sector still employed
more then 38.1% of the Romanian population. There was though a small increase
over the years in the urban population percentage.
For the Jews the situation
also changed, very much Jews used to work in the "office" sector so they
already were concentrated in the urban areas, so they did not suffer that
much from this "realization" of the national minorities.
In 1956 about 63.3% had a
"office" job and about 27.4% had a job in the farming business, in 1966
they worked somewhat more in the agricultural sector: 29.0% and somewhat
less in the "office" sector: 62.45. Because of this forced urbanization there were a lot of Jews who started to work for themselves (Free-lancers)
about 5.2%.
The struggle against the oppression
From the fist half of the 1930s Romanian economic policy
aimed at weakening and taking over the economic bases of national minorities in
Transylvania. Despite the general economic crisis, large proportion of the
German, Hungarian and Jewish population consisted of an economically strong
middle class, with well-established industrial, commercial and co-operative
networks.
The co-operative movement proved to be the most effective
method of combating the governmental anti-minorities economic policy.
The Transylvanian Jews the third relative nationality in the
1920s founded the Transylvanian National Federation.
Because the official Romanian policy aimed at splintering
the national minorities, the government supported Zionism and the
Yiddish-language school network in a successful attempt to separate the Jewish
minority from the Hungarian camp. This because at that time 11.1% of the urban
population and 2.1% of the rural population of Transylvania belonged to the
Jewish religion and the majority of them claimed Hungarian as being their native
tongue.
Before the socialist state Romania's National Liberal Party
was primarily responsible for the oppression of the national minorities and the
neglect of their rights. But the National peasant Party was not much better when
it came to discriminative measures.
After an unsuccessful political struggle to gain equal
rights, the Transylvanian national minorities realized that they could fight
oppression only on an intellectual level, yet they did not abandon their
political claims. The result was that literature and politics became
inseparable. This way Transylvanianism arose, an idea, which proclaimed the
mutual co-operation of the Transylvanian people. The idea of Transylvanianism
however did not lead to any reaction with the
Romanians.
Better times
Just at the end of the war
there was a short time in which there was quite some freedom for the Jews
in Romania during the government of King Michael I and his "coup d'etat"
on August 23, 1944, which ended the Antonescu-Horia Sima Government. This
new government ended the war against the Soviet Union and, on August 25,
declared war on Romania's erstwhile allies. The Jewish population was accorded
a form of rehabilitation and a certain degree of tolerance. Mainly because,
it would have been unsuitable to initiate discriminatory measures against
the Jews, the victims of fascism, during or immediately after the "anti-fascist"
campaign. This relative freedom was reflected in the fact that a portion
of the membership and leadership of the Romanian Communist Party at the
end of 1944 consisted of Jewish intellectuals.
The first political organization of the Romanian Jews after the war, the Democratic Committee of Jews was
founded in June 1945. It attempted to group the Jewish population of the
country into a united front.
Communism
In 1948 Communists with aid
from the Soviets put communism into power in Romania through, as it seemed
not to democratically correct elections. However the big changes came in
1954 when Gheorghiu-Dej seized power.
The wave of arrests, which
followed struck particularly against members of the old leadership, social
democrats, intellectuals, non-Romanian elements and persons of Jewish origin.
In Ceausescu's Romania the
Jews didn't have it any better.
Notes
[1] 'Holocaust in Romania'
by Matatias Carp, page 7.
Bibliography
Jews in Transylvania
by Johan Otter (NL)
What happened to the Jews
in Transylvania during World War II?
Well, nothing good I can
tell you.
Anti-Jewish laws
Population
of Transylvania for all the major minorities.
100
100
100
100
100
The most significant thing
that is visible is the enormous decrees of the amount of Jews, from 3.2%
in 1930 in Transylvania to 0.12% in 1977 in the whole of Romania. This
is partly cause of the war losses the Jews had to endure and partly (as
I said earlier) cause of the great emigration flow of Jews from Transylvania
to the state of Israel. For the Transylvanian Jews this was the direct
way to ensure their own safety and their freedom, what they the lacked
in Transylvania and the rest of Romania.
In Present day Romania there
is finally freedom for the Jews in Transylvania?
[2] 'National minorities
in Romania' by Elemer Illyes, page 25.
[3] Data from: 'National
minorities in Romania' by Elemer Illyes.
'Romania Country overview'
by the World Bank .
