CST Transylvania - ESSAY
Jews in Transylvania

by Johan Otter (NL)

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:
What happened to the Jews in Transylvania during World War II?
Well, nothing good I can tell you.

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:

• Hungarians living in the southern part fleeing to the northern part.
• Romanians fleeing from the northern part to the southern one.
• The Jews didn't have that much choice, both territories where occupied by fascist forces.

Cruelties

Romania was not that nice to "their" Jews. "What Romania lacked in cold calculation of the diabolically systematic German death machines, they made up in the sheer savagery of their human slaughter houses, the mass rapes of their victims wives and daughters, or the burning alive of 20.000 Odessa's Jews" [1].

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 "labour 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 labour service. In addition to forced labour 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 Antunescu'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.
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.

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.

Urbanisation

One thing that is special about Transylvania is that it is the most urbanised 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 "ruralisation" 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 urbanisation 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 realised 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 Antunescu-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 organisation 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.
In Present day Romania there is finally freedom for the Jews in Transylvania?
 

Notes

[1] 'Holocaust in Romania' by Matatias Carp, page 7.
[2] 'National minorities in Romania' by Elemer Illyes, page 25.
[3] Data from: 'National minorities in Romania' by Elemer Illyes.
 

Bibliography

last update: 11 JUL 2002 by Ralph