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79 roasa Uprising needs to be added to the list of violent acts against Jews in Romania . In Brusturoasa, a small village in Moldavia, peasants turned on their Jewish neighbors.The local priest instigated the violence, and other elites in the village did nothing to stop it.The anger of the local peasantry, born of a deplorable economic situation, was quicklydirected against Brusturoasa’s Jews, whom the peasants blamed for their plight. The result of this violent episode was the expulsion of the entire Jewish population from the village of Brusturoasa. Antisemitism as physical violence, whether collective or individual, has frequently manifested itself in modern Romania.Within Romania, syntheticworks on Jewish history by Carol Iancu and Victor Neuman have examined aspects of this violence.1 The history of antisemitism in Romania also has attracted the attention of scholars working outside the country, including Mariana Hausleitner , Dietmar Müller, Raphael Vago, and Beate Welter.2 The pages of these works show plainly that in modern Romania, as in the rest of Europe, antisemitism had a violent component that revealed itself in unprecedented brutalityand cruelty. Until now, scholars have all but ignored the Brusturoasa Uprising. Yet what took place in Brusturoasa in 1885 anticipates much of what happened on a much larger scale in 1907, when one of the most bloody peasant uprisings in the history of modern Europe shook Romania.3 In both cases the underlying cause was the poor condition of the peasants. But the uprisings also needed leaders (village priests, mayors, and teachers) to instigate the violence, as well as victims of the peasants’ wrath (Jews). The important role played by emblematic figures of the Romanian village during this period emerges clearly from this analysis of Brusturoasa. ■ ■ The Romanian Context To understand and better integrate this episode into the history of antisemitism, it is necessary to discuss the close relationship between Romanian statehood, international human rights, and the severe social dislocation Iulia Onac THE BRUSTUROASA UPRISING IN ROMANIA An episode that is sad to remember, the 1885 Brustu4 80 : Local Violence and “Ethnic” Politics that accompanied the arrival of capitalist agriculture in rural eastern Europe. Modern Romania began to take shape between the onset of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and the Revolutions of 1848. Both internal and external factors influenced this process. The union of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859, combined with the support of the Great Powers, resulted in the creation of modern Romania. The era that followed, which lasted through the end of the First World War, overlapped with the modernization of the Romanian state, society, and economy. During this time, Romania developed rapidly. Industrialization took off, although it was still too undeveloped to provide opportunities for all those seeking work, which resulted in an excess of unskilled labor and kept wages at a low level. Significant migration nonetheless began to the capital of Bucharest, the Danube port cities of Galați, and the new center of the oil industry, Ploiești. Beginning in 1869, railroads slowly spread across the country. In spite of this diversification, the Romanian economy and society remained closely linked to agriculture.4 These structural conditions in turn shaped daily relations among different ethnic and religious groups. In particular, they deeply affected the lives of Jews in the region. An active element in economic life, Jews contributed significantly to Romania’s modernization as craftsmen, industrialists, merchants, bankers, and medical doctors. State building and economic transformation, in short, greatly influenced the place of Jews in the Romanian society. Demographic changes also had an important impact.The number of Jews in Romania was small but significant. In 1861 Wallachia and Moldavia combined had 3,790,000 inhabitants. By 1899, when the last prewarcensus was taken, the population had reached 5,957,000 inhabitants, an increase of 57 percent.5 The growth in the Jewish population during the same time was closer to 100 percent . According to statistics published in the American Jewish Year Book, some 269,015 Jews lived in Romania (4.5 percent of the total) around 1900.6 Much of this population was concentrated in Moldavia, where Jews comprised about 10 percent of the province’s total population. Many Romanian Jews came from the Russian Empire, drawn by agreements with Romanian noble landowners, who granted Jews economic privileges, provided land for synagogues and cemeteries , and allowed tax deductions for a certain number of years. In some cases, this resulted in settlements where the majority of the population was Jewish, a...

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