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Vol. 79/No. 44 December 7, 2015
(Books of the Month column)
1913: Jew-hatred key to Romanian rulers’ grip on power
The excerpt below is from Leon Trotsky’s The Balkan Wars (1912-13),
one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in November. Trotsky, living in
exile in Vienna, covered the war as a correspondent for a Kiev socialist
newspaper. The chapter “The Jewish Question” details the place of
Jew-hatred in feudal Romania, strikingly similar to scapegoating and
attacks on Jews today as the crisis of capitalism deepens.
Trotsky, one of the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, fought to
defend and advance the revolutionary course of V.I. Lenin and the
Bolshevik Party against the political counterrevolution led by Joseph
Stalin. Until his assassination in 1940, he fought to build an
international movement capable of leading the working class and its
allies to power. Copyright © 1980 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by
permission.
BY LEON TROTSKY
In nothing is Romania revealed so completely and authentically as in
her Jewish Question. King Carol is proud that he has never departed from
the “strictly constitutional” path. The Romanian press enjoys great
freedom, and from time to time employs quite incredible “expressions”
when writing about the king, without suffering any consequences. In this
country ministers are not addressed as “Excellency.” Political émigrés
are not handed over. But beneath this gilded surface of political
freedoms is hidden the real, the true Romania — and while this is most
profoundly revealed in the situation of the peasantry, it is seen most
vividly in the Jewish Question.
Three hundred thousand Romanian Jews are not considered Romanian
citizens. They, their fathers, and their grandfathers, were born in
Romania. They were not and are not under the protection of any other
state. And yet, nevertheless, they are treated as foreigners in Romania.
The Romanian Jew enjoys no protection from the constitution. Any Jew can
at any moment be expelled from the country like a wandering vagabond.
Families that have grown up with Romania over several generations never
cease to be aware that they are only lodgers. But that is not the whole
of it.
While excluding the Jews from the roll of citizens, the state
nevertheless burdens them with all the responsibilities of citizenship.
Not only do the Jews have to pay all taxes, they are also liable for
military service. Though declared to be aliens, they serve in the
Romanian army. The state, which denies to the Jewish worker, craftsman,
or merchant the title of Romanian citizen — the elementary right
possessed by every pickpocket of Romanian stock — this same state called
to the colors 30,000 rightless Jews during the recent mobilization.
All Romania is revealed in the country’s Jewish Question. The servile
bondage of the peasantry, the parasitism on state funds, the rule of the
boyar-ciocoi cliques — all this finds its crown in the qualified
rightlessness of Romanian Jewry.
Romania is ruled by Purishkevich. He is the master of Romania’s soil, he
thrusts his arm up to the elbow into the state’s cashbox, the social and
political atmosphere here is filled with his mental and moral
exhalations. Purishkevich “hates” the Jews. But this is a special sort
of hatred. Without Jews Purishkevich couldn’t get by. And he knows this
very well. He needs Jews. But of what sort? Jews without rights,
deprived of individuality by their lack of rights. This sort of Jew has
to serve as intermediary between Purishkevich as landlord and the
peasantry, between Purishkevich as politician and his clientele — to
serve in the capacity of leaseholder, usurer, middleman, or venal
journalist. He has to fulfill the dirtiest commissions for Purishkevich
— and Purishkevich has no other kind — and to keep at it.
But that’s not all. While serving as a tool of feudal exploitation, the
rightless Jew has at the same time to serve as lightning-conductor for
the wrath of the exploited. After fleecing the peasant and pillaging the
state’s till, replenished by that same peasant, Romania’s Purishkevich
then fulfills his highest destiny when, from the orator’s tribune, or in
the columns of his press, he angrily denounces the Jewish leaseholder,
the Jewish usurer. … This is the basis in serfdom of Romanian
anti-Semitism. But that does not exhaust the matter. In a stagnant
society in which economic development, entangled in obstacles, makes
only slow progress, a multitude of unsatisfied demands urge various
groups of people along the line of least resistance — the line of
anti-Semitism. The ciocoi, the new landowners, who have bought or leased
boyars’ lands, naturally seek to concentrate rural usury in their own
national, Christian, true Romanian hands.
Driven from the countryside, the Jews make up nearly a third of the
population in Romania’s towns. The craftsman, the shopkeeper, the
restaurant-keeper, and with them the doctor and the journalist, are
embittered by the competition from Jews. The lawyer, the official, the
officer are all afraid that if the Jews obtained equal rights they will
take away their clients or step into their jobs. The teacher and the
priest, agents in the countryside of the national state idea bound up
with serfdom, assure the peasant that his poverty and servitude are
caused by the Jews. The newspaper, in so far as it reaches the peasant,
tells him the same thing. Anti-Semitism has become the state religion,
the last psychological cement holding together a feudal society that is
rotten through and through, and covered over with the gilt tinsel of a
constitution essentially based on privilege. …
Jewish children are not accepted in the state primary schools. They are
accepted in secondary educational institutions only if there are
“vacant” places, which in practice means almost never. The Jews have set
up their own schools, using their own resources. A wall is thus raised
between Jewish and Romanian children; and yet at the same time the
powers that be make it a condition for “granting” civil rights to the
Jews that they become merged in Romanian society. Recent agitation has
been started against the Jewish private schools, simply because they
raise the cultural level of the Jewish masses, and it is quite obvious
that, the higher their cultural level, the greater the danger that the
Jews, suffering from lack of rights, will present for the rotten
Romanian state. As for those Jewish workers who take part in the
economic or political struggle of their class, the government whose turn
it is chases them across the frontier by dozens and hundreds as
“undesirable aliens.” Even in the hospitals, Jews are treated as
second-class patients. And so on, without end. …
Related articles:
Jew-hatred, attacks on free speech threat to working class
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