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No. 28. Vienna, 13th July 1900. 4th Year

The Jewish Distress in Roumania.

Communicated from the letter of a Roumanian by O. Erter.

— — — The soul of the Roumanian ministry is Take Jonescu. A comparatively young man still, hardly past the first half of the forties. His admirers extol him as the most brilliant orator of Roumania; at all events, before he became a minister for the first time, he was the most talked-of advocate in Bucharest, and as such he carried on his chambers even during the intervals imposed upon his ministerial career, as for instance during the Liberal régime of Sturdza. One would surely do this minister — whom, for the rest, his autochthonous Roumanianism did not hinder from marrying an Englishwoman — an injustice were one to hold him in any direction a man of inviolable principle. He is such neither in the political nor in the confessional sense. He is a man of business as a man and as a politician. As often as he formerly stayed in Vienna, he lodged as the guest of a wealthy Jewish banker from Roumania; whether he still does so, I do not know. Herr Take Jonescu is therefore not properly a Jew-hater, neither when he finds himself, as happens, in straits for money, nor when he has, as likewise happens at times, money like hay. He is, however, the walking extract of all the qualities which are united in the upper stratum of Roumanianism, and among these qualities, however fine and modernised they may appear outwardly, one would seek in vain for any serious conception of life, of the State, or of society. Much varnish, much cunning, much appetite for enjoyment, but little, very little conscience.

This characterisation of the one man may safely be generalised; unhappily, however, it fits not a few Bucharest Jews with fuller money-bags, who dwell in the Strada Victoriei and thereabouts in the neighbourhood of the royal palace. In former days there was mockery in abundance in Western Europe over the Roman penal colony in Wallachia, but that was a playing with philological-ethnographical reminiscences. One must grasp more firmly if one is to arrive at a picture of the sad reality. It is a great cultural lie with which one has to reckon. It is forever said that Roumania is an advanced post of European culture in the Orient. This catchword has been particularly current in diplomacy since the Congress of Berlin. But Prince Bismarck himself already made the experience that the garrison of this supposed exposed fort of culture will know of nothing whatever save a scanty Parisian veneer over Oriental corruption and craft; precisely in the Jewish question the Iron Chancellor sought altogether in vain to guide Roumania into the European path.

Now the European Occident gets to see daily, quite immediately and with its own eyes, the Roumanian Jewish misery that mocks all description. It is nothing less than a brand of shame for Europe, this Roumanian Ahasuerusdom, stripped of its rights, driven from house and home, wandering westward in hunger and lamentation. But while one supposes that the much-vaunted European humanity must rise up in blazing indignation, not a mouth and not a hand stirs. It is just as though Europe were afraid of Roumania. And in the end it is also a little so. The Roumanians are stroked diplomatically from the right, that they may not fall over to the left, and from the left, that they may not fall over to the right. And so the fiction of Roumania's cultural calling continues in spite of all. What does the unspeakable misery of these hundreds of thousands of Roumanian Jews signify to this diplomatically so finely schooled civilised Europe? But people such as the said Herr Take Jonescu understand this, and they order themselves accordingly.

Tolerated aliens in the land in which they were born and in which their grandparents were born already — that was but the beginning, when Roumania still stood in the infancy of its independent statehood. A hundred and fifty — no more — have indeed been naturalised by Parliament; what more can one ask? Upon the beginning followed the continuation. Bad harvests, bad husbandry, agrarian exhaustion of the soil brought unfavourable times upon Roumania, and then men advanced to the question: Why tolerate the aliens at all? They were refused admission to the army, the schools were barred to them