Jewish Resistance to Romanianization, 1940–44 by Stefan Cristian Ionescu (review)

One of the peculiarities of Romania's autonomous Holocaust is the sharp divergence between the territories acquired after World War I and the so-called Old Kingdom (Wallachia and Moldavia). In the new territories of Bukovina and Bessarabia, Romanian forces decimated Jewish populations through mass shootings and deportations to camps in occupied Ukraine, where most died. Jews residing in the Old Kingdom, on the other hand, suffered a number of indignities and some violence, but as a community survived the war. The former have been well studied; the latter—those not subjected to genocidal violence and deportation—are the focus for Stefan Ionescu's study of Bucharest's Jewish community.

Thanks to Jean Ancel, Mihai Chioveanu, Mariana Hausleitner, Armin Heinen, Radu Ioanid, Vladimir Solonari, and others, scholarship on Romania's role as Nazi Germany's most important ally and the willing perpetrator of its own autochthonous Holocaust has moved beyond simply demonstrating that Romania committed genocide, to the analysis of political, socio-economic, and cultural factors influencing state policy and popular behavior towards Jews and Roma. Yet save for Ancel's The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jewry (2007), little attention has been paid to the process by which the Romanian state expropriated Jewish property and parceled it out to ethnic Romanians. Dubbed "Romanianization," this program was "an ideologically driven social-engineering policy designed to build and empower a self-sufficient, productive, and efficient ethnic-Romanian bourgeoisie as a core element of a developed state" (p. 4).

This expropriation unfolded in two stages, the first under the National Legionary State (September 1940–January 1941), an experiment in power-sharing between the fascist Iron Guard and the military dictator Ion Antonescu. The primary victims during this stage were less assimilated rural Jews. The seizure of property occurred as a mix of state-orchestrated theft by appointed commissars and outright plunder. The process was marked by the anarchic violence characteristic of the Iron Guard. This phase—and the National Legionary State itself—ended with a failed uprising of the Iron Guard. Afterwards, with his power undisputed, Antonescu initiated the second phase, targeting urban Jews through a combination of seizing their real estate and restricting Jewish businesses and employment, proceeding slowly so as to limit the stress on Romania's economy. Though plundered and pressed into forced labor, Jews of the Old Kingdom were not placed in ghettoes; out of a mixture of pragmatism and pride (and despite his rabid antisemitism), Antonescu refused to deport them to Nazi camps. Ironically, the exaggerated perception of the role Bucharest's Jews in the national economy provided the rationale for both their persecution and the basis for their survival: Antonescu feared the damage rapid Romanianization might cause.

Ionescu makes several other contributions to our understanding of the Romanian Holocaust. First, the chapter on the seizure of Roma property makes a welcome addition. Drawing largely from the work of Viorel Achim, Michelle Kelso, and myself, Ionescu nonetheless identifies previously-unknown sources, including diaries, that offer windows into Romanian-Roma relations. Non-experts may be surprised to learn that the majority of deported Roma were sedentary, rather than nomadic, and indeed that their persecution and deportation were in part motivated by greed.

Ionescu demonstrates that the concept of Romanianization predates the Holocaust; several important mainstream intellectuals had long theorized about the necessity of confiscating "foreign-owned" property. As the theory went, the preponderance of Jews in Romania's economy, especially the industrial and banking sectors, was unnatural and oppressed ethnic Romanians. To right this wrong, the government should intervene by seizing Jewish property and limiting the overall role of Jews (and other supposedly hostile "alien" elements, like Armenians) in the professions. Ionescu builds on Vladimir Solonari's analysis of prewar intellectual trends to show how the dreams of building an ethno-state by the likes of philosopher Nae Ionescu found iterations in other disciplines such as economics. Ancel's research, while encompassing Romania as a whole, focused heavily...