"Le sentiment national est une barriere plus forte que toutes les lois": "la question juive" dans les debats du Parlement roumain (1866-1871)

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the debates in the Romanian Constitutional Assembly of 1866 concerning the article 7 of the Constitution that excludes non-Christians from political rights. It also examines the governmental regulations and the parliamentary questions to ministers on the discriminations and violence against the Jews during the years 1867-1869. The paper concludes that the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to acknowledge the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a given, rather than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. Citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. Furthermore, the paper holds that the parliamentarians' xenophobia and anti-Semitism is the expression of nationalism as the most modern way of understanding what binds a political community together, and not of medieval pogroms that oppose Christians and Jews on religious bases. The years 1866-1869 lay thus the basis for what was subsequently to become the more coherent and doctrinaire nationalist anti-Semitism that incorporated anti-Semitism into the very nature of being a Romanian and into the Romanian national identity itself. The paper aims at drawing more nuanced conclusions about the recently much-debated character of citizenship and nationhood in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. The article holds that the parliament is a site for political conflicts related to the process of nation-building and a privileged political space of production of the nation-state. Moreover, parliamentary discourse can be seen as an instrument of investigation of an epoch, the Parliament being both a symbolical and a historical site.